Will PCI Express Still Use IRQs?

After recently running into a situation where I ran out of IRQs on a system,
I'm reminded that the whole IRQ system is a leftover from a much different
day on the PC, and it's probably been outgrown at this point. Will PCI
Express either do away with IRQs entirely or somehow introduce additional
interrupts so that cards that require hardware interrupts don't have to
steal from the limited pool of IRQs available in the original PC
architecture?

--
Will

On Tue, 6 Sep 2005 18:09:06 -0700, "Will" <>
wrote:

>After recently running into a situation where I ran out of IRQs on a system,
>I'm reminded that the whole IRQ system is a leftover from a much different
>day on the PC, and it's probably been outgrown at this point. Will PCI
>Express either do away with IRQs entirely or somehow introduce additional
>interrupts so that cards that require hardware interrupts don't have to
>steal from the limited pool of IRQs available in the original PC
>architecture?

PCI Express uses in-band message-based interrupts, not the side-banded
level-sensitive interrupts of PCI & PCI-X Mode 1. Oodles of MSIs, no sharing
required...

On Tue, 6 Sep 2005 18:09:06 -0700, "Will"
<> wrote:

>After recently running into a situation where I ran out of IRQs on a system,
>I'm reminded that the whole IRQ system is a leftover from a much different
>day on the PC, and it's probably been outgrown at this point. Will PCI
>Express either do away with IRQs entirely or somehow introduce additional
>interrupts so that cards that require hardware interrupts don't have to
>steal from the limited pool of IRQs available in the original PC
>architecture?

On XP IRQ's are already done away with, it uses memory address space
instead.Sure it shows an IRQ for devices but if two devices are
sharing the same IRQ it doesn't matter.