Re: Interrupt forwarding

[Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>]

Mark Williamson <maw48@cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:
>
> I'd seen they're available on some non-PCIE hardware.  I assumed it was just 
> recent / high end hardware (maybe just on PCI-X).  (for instance, I think my 
> workstation at Intel does use MSI interrupts and IIRC has PCI / PCI-X 
> support).
>
> Does anyone know to what extent MSI is actually used these days?

Not very widely. The PCI card and the chipset has to support it.
Most PCI cards don't.  Non Intel chipsets often don't support
MSI at all (e.g. on most AMD systems). Worst there are even
some cards who advertise MSI support, but they lock up
when you actually use it.

PCI-Express requires MSI support though, but there are hardly
any PCI-Express cards already available.

MSI-X support is even worse, only a few highend cards seem to support it.

Also the MSI support in Linux seems to be not entirely stable yet.

-Andi



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