Re: __cli on 4xx - MSR:CE?

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 06:11:57PM -0700, David Blythe wrote:
>
> Exactly.  I hacked something up (badly) to use the watchdog critical
> interrupt as a low-overhead interrupt for kernel profiling including
> profiling normal interrupt routines.  It would take a lot of mucking
> around to support critical interrupts well, but it would be nice support
> to have and should be independent of regular interrupts.  When you say
> 2.5 should handle it, are you suggesting someone should make it so or
> asserting that it already does?

I'm asserting that the basic support is already there.  It is untested
though, and so probably buggy.

> David Gibson wrote:
> >On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 12:30:51PM -0700, akuster wrote:
> >
> >>Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> >>
> >>>Shouldn't __cli on 4xx disable the MSR CE bit as well as EE?
> >>>
> >>>-Hollis
> >>>
> >>It should.  Critical interrupts are currently not enabled in the kernel
> >>
> >>armin
> >>
> >
> >No, that isn't clear.
> >
> >As Armin says, (external) critical interrupts are not supported at the
> >moment in the 4xx kernel, so at the moment this is irrelevant.
> >
> >However if someone ever did implement the use of critical external
> >interrupts on a board, this would surely be because interrupts from
> >the relevant hardwware are, well, critical, and require extremely low
> >latency processing.  It therefore seems sensible that such routines
> >should run even when normal interrupts are disabled.  Obvioulsy the
> >critical interrupt handlers would have to be written very carefully to
> >avoid interfering with interrupted code.
> >
> >If critical interrupts are disabled everywhere that normal interrupts
> >are disabled, there seems little point in having them.
> >
> >I believe the interrupt handling code (head_4xx.S and entry.S) in 2.5
> >should be able to cope with critical external interrupts.  When
> >transferring to a critical interrupt handler critical interrupts will
> >remain disabled until the handler has completed.
> >
>
>
>
>

--
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david@gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson

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