Re: Interrupt forwarding

[Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 18:48:53 +0000, Keir Fraser
<Keir.Fraser@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 12 Mar 2005, at 18:33, Jon Smirl wrote:
> 
> >> Shared interrupts are slightly worse because the irq won't get
> >> unmasked
> >> until all receivers say their work is done. If one lock sup it starves
> >> the rest -- until this is detected and that domain gets blown away.
> >
> > After you blow away the domain how do you acknowledge the interrupt?
> > Is all hardware required to have a tiny driver in the supervisor to
> > handling acking in this case? If you don't ack it, it is going to keep
> > interrupting.
> 
> We don't go that far. A sensible approach would be to require the
> driver to be restarted, and to reset the hardware device, before
> unmasking. Or to rate limit each interrupt line to an
> administrator-configurable 'reasonable' number of IRQs per second --
> this might also catch bugs where drivers are not properly acking
> devices for other reasons.

In x86 boxes almost everything is shared. Leaving the interrupt masked
off will probably disable 20% of the hardware in the box.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com


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