"Nobody Cared" Problem

I recently upgraded to a 2.6.11 kernel, and was getting the delightful "nobody cared" message shortly after booting up my laptop. This was preventing my combo NIC/serial PCMCIA card from working, (in particular, the NIC doesn't come up; I don't care about the serial card part). I've taken ACPI out of the kernel; several posts on the Gentoo forums pointed to ACPI as a possible culprit.

Under 2.4.x, the card appeared to run on IRQ 3; under 2.6.11, it was trying to go to IRQ 11. I started out trying to figure out how to get it back on IRQ 3, where it worked just fine.

I tried an edit to /etc/conf.d/pcmcia of 'PCIC_OPTS="irq_list=3,4,7"'. This put eth0 on IRQ3, but left ttyS1 on IRQ11. I also tried excluding IRQ 11 by adding "exclude irq 11" to my /etc/pcmcia/config.opts, which resulted in dmesg output that said that the NIC was at "io 0x300, irq 3", but below that "ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 11) is a 16550A". And, I tried the "pci=routeirq" kernel boot option, to no avail.

I posted the above info to the Gentoo forums, and got a reply back from diastelo suggesting that I disable support for the serial device in the kernel. I had tried removing the 'serial' script from the boot runlevel, but that made no difference. But removing serial PCMCIA support from the kernel did the trick, and the NIC has worked fine ever since.