[lug] Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7, then hang

[Andrew Gilmore]

I've googled a bit for this one, but come up empty so far.
If anyone has any ideas, that'd be great.

This is my first seriously misbehaving system under Linux, and I'm a bit 
annoyed.

Symptoms:

ssh session over ethernet hangs after a few CRs.
Console immediately says:
Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7
then about once a second or two:
(without DMA enabled)
hda: lost interrupt
(with DMA enabled)
idedma some error message about only supporting lostirq function 13
hda: lost interrupt

The console still responds, but starting anything that accesses the HD 
will hang with no recourse but reset.

Box:

Pentium 200, 32 MB ram, 2 gig HD on ide0, CDROM on ide1
VIA VXPro chipset (chips on motherboard have "VXTwo" logo)
Trident video card (96xx series) text mode only
Netgear FA310 ethernet card
RedHat 8.0, no patches yet (original kernel 2.4.18-14)

Story so far:

I originally suspected the ide DMA functions, due to some l-k traffic 
about lost interrupts on VPx (x<3) chipsets, but the problem still 
occurs with dma disabled.

I have two identical ethernet cards (the FA310) and they are on the 
supported hardware list, both show this same result.

I've been unable to reproduce this bug from the console. There are 
occassional occurances of the error message during the boot process, but 
the box doesn't hang at that time.

Any ideas?

Andrew