Re: PCI, ACPI, IRQ, IOAPIC: reroute PCI interrupt to legacy boot interrupt equivalent

[Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 07:09:25PM +0800, Stefan Assmann wrote:
> Hi Len,
> 
> Len Brown wrote:
> > Stefan,
> > I had to exclude your changes to drivers/acpi/pci_irq.c from
> > e1d3a90846b40ad3160bf4b648d36c6badad39ac
> > in order to get some other changes to that file upstream in the
> > 2.6.29 merge window.
> > 
> > I left the other parts of the quirk intact - so at the moment
> > on one of the quirked machines, you'll see
> > 
> > PCI quirk: reroute interrupts for...
> > 
> > but will not see
> > 
> > pci irq %d -> rerouted to legacy
> > 
> > as the quirk is effectively disabled.
> > 
> > I had difficulty trying to port this patch to the new pci_irq.c
> > because fundamentally I don't understand what it is trying
> > to do, and why.
> 
> Let me try to give you a short overview of what's happening there.
> 
> If an IRQ arrives at line X of a non-primary IO-APIC and that line is
> masked a new IRQ will be generated on the primary IO-APIC/PIC. This is
> called a "Boot Interrupt" by Intel. It's purpose is, as the name
> suggests, to ensure that the IRQ is handled at boot time (when the
> non-primary) IO-APIC is still disabled.
> 
> Condition to be met for "Boot Interrupts":
> - line X on non-primary IO-APIC interrupt line is masked
> - line X is asserted
> 
> This behavior is not necessary during normal operation as the IRQ is
> handled by the non-primary IO-APIC itself. Now imagine what happens if
> these Boot Interrupts would occur during normal operation. You'd see
> spurious IRQs on your primary IO-APIC which, in the worst case, will
> bring down the interrupt line they occur on! Every device that shares this
> interrupt line will fail when this happens.
> 
> Why can these IRQ lines be brought down by Boot Interrupts? Because
> there's no handler installed on the primary IO-APIC IRQ line that can
> take care of them and after too many unhandled IRQs the line will be shut
> down by the kernel.
> 
> What this quirk does:
> It installs the interrupt handler on the primary IO-APICs interrupt line
> instead of the (original) non-primary IO-APICs interrupt line, keeping
> the original interrupt line masked. This guarantees that for every IRQ
> arriving at the non-primary IO-APIC a Boot Interrupt is generated _and_
> handled properly.
> 
> Note: You need this quirk if you mask your interrupts during handling.
So a device can generate interrupt from two irqs. And we can get the irq
number for the routing table. Can we extend the irq mechanism and
automatically register the interrupt handler for the two irqs?

Thanks,
Shaohua