[ISSUE + PATCH] Interrupts were enabled early by spinlock guard

Edgar Bonet
2025-08-14T13:51:30Z

Hello everybody!

I am facing an "Interrupts were enabled early" kernel warning which, as
far as I can tell, is caused by a spinlock guard in an ARM/Microchip
IRQCHIP driver. I think I solved the issue, and I am proposing a patch
below, after the scissor. But I must first disclose that:

* I am completely new to Linux internals and its development process.
This is why I chose to err on the side of providing too much
information on my issue. It is not unlikely that I am doing
something very wrong.

* I am not subscribed to either of the linux-{,arm-}kernel mailing
lists

* I will be far from the Internet in the few days to come. I should be
connected an responsive starting from 2025-08-24.

## Context

I am playing with an Acmesystems Acqua[1] system on module, which is
based on a SAMA5D31 SoC (single core Cortex-A5). I maintain the
Buildroot defconfig for this board,[2] which is currently based on a
vanilla Linux kernel v6.12.41.

As I wanted to check that the board runs fine on newer kernels, I built
a v6.16 for it using gcc 14, binutils 2.43, the in-tree sama5_defconfig
merged with this fragment:

# CONFIG_BRIDGE is not set
# CONFIG_MODULES is not set
# CONFIG_NET_DSA is not set
# CONFIG_WIRELESS is not set
# CONFIG_USB_NET_DRIVERS is not set
# CONFIG_WLAN is not set
# CONFIG_MEDIA_SUPPORT is not set
# CONFIG_SOUND is not set
# CONFIG_AUTOFS_FS is not set

and the Buildroot-provided device tree, patched for compatibility with
Linux commit 510a6190cf5e ("ARM: dts: microchip: fix faulty ohci/ehci
node names").

The defconfig fragment above is meant to remove module support (with
some unused drivers along the way), which makes testing easier for me.

## Issue

While booting, Linux v6.16 printed this message on the serial console:

------------[ cut here ]------------
WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 0 at init/main.c:1024 start_kernel+0x4d0/0x5dc
Interrupts were enabled early
CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper Not tainted 6.16.0 #1 NONE
Hardware name: Atmel SAMA5
Call trace:
unwind_backtrace from show_stack+0x10/0x14
show_stack from dump_stack_lvl+0x38/0x48
dump_stack_lvl from __warn+0x78/0xd4
__warn from warn_slowpath_fmt+0x98/0xc8
warn_slowpath_fmt from start_kernel+0x4d0/0x5dc
start_kernel from 0x0
---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---

The board seemed to work fine, so maybe this warning is completely
harmless. It looked, however, scary enough to deserve some
investigation.

## Bug hunting

I could not reproduce the issue on a qemu virtual machine. All tests
were then done on the real hardware.

I looked for the Linux commit that introduced the issue. ‘git bisect’
told me this was 195298c3b116 ("genirq/generic-chip: Convert core code
to lock guards"). I then checked out a recent mainline kernel, namely
v6.17-rc1, and tried to revert that commit. For this, I first had to
revert two follow-up commits, namely 7ae844a6650c ("genirq/generic-chip:
Remove unused lock wrappers") and 771487050f83 ("genirq/generic-chip:
Fix incorrect lock guard conversions"). This was unsuccessful: I still
had the warning.

I went back to a clean v6.17-rc1 and tried to find the thing that was
enabling interrupts early. After lots of printk() debugging, I
discovered it was a guard(raw_spinlock_irq) destructor. The call chain
is this (line numbers are for v6.17-rc1):

start_kernel (init/main.c:1011)
-> time_init (arch/arm/kernel/time.c:96)
-> timer_probe (drivers/clocksource/timer-probe.c:30)
=> tcb_clksrc_init (drivers/clocksource/timer-atmel-tcb.c:413)
-> of_irq_get (drivers/of/irq.c:474)
-> irq_create_of_mapping (kernel/irq/irqdomain.c:980)
-> irq_create_fwspec_mapping (kernel/irq/irqdomain.c:848)
=> aic5_irq_domain_xlate (drivers/irqchip/irq-atmel-aic5.c:287)
-> guard destructor (raw_spin_unlock_irq?)

where (=>) is an indirect call through a function pointer.

## Tentative fix

Commit 771487050f83 gave me the inspiration. The guard in question was
introduced by b00bee8afaca ("irqchip: Convert generic irqchip locking to
guards"), which replaced calls to irq_gc_lock_irq{save,restore}() by
guard(raw_spinlock_irq) (with no “save” in the name). The commit log
states that this is “intended and correct”, but I could not make sense
of the explanation. My (possibly faulty) understanding is that the guard
constructor disables interrupts, and the destructor either
unconditionally enables them (raw_spinlock_irq), or restores the
previous interrupt state (raw_spinlock_irqsave).

I then replaced guard(raw_spinlock_irq) with guard(raw_spinlock_irqsave)
and that seemed to do the job: the warning is gone. See the patch below
the scissors.

Best regards, and thank-you for reading so far.

Edgar Bonet.

[1] https://www.acmesystems.it/acqua
[2] https://gitlab.com/buildroot.org/buildroot/-/blob/2025.08-rc1/configs/acmesystems_acqua_a5_512mb_defconfig

------------------------------------------------------------------ >8 --
Subject: [PATCH] irqchip/atmel-aic5: Fix incorrect lock guard conversion

Commit b00bee8afaca ("irqchip: Convert generic irqchip locking to guards")
replaced calls to irq_gc_lock_irq{save,restore}() with
guard(raw_spinlock_irq). However, in irq-atmel-aic5.c, one such guard is
created early in the boot process, before interrupts are initially enabled.
As its destructor enables interrupts, this results in the following warning
on a SAMA5D31-based system:

------------[ cut here ]------------
WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 0 at init/main.c:1024 start_kernel+0x4d0/0x5dc
Interrupts were enabled early
CPU: 0 UID: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper Not tainted 6.16.0 #1 NONE
Hardware name: Atmel SAMA5
Call trace:
unwind_backtrace from show_stack+0x10/0x14
show_stack from dump_stack_lvl+0x38/0x48
dump_stack_lvl from __warn+0x78/0xd4
__warn from warn_slowpath_fmt+0x98/0xc8
warn_slowpath_fmt from start_kernel+0x4d0/0x5dc
start_kernel from 0x0
---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---

Fix this by using guard(raw_spinlock_irqsave) instead.

Fixes: b00bee8afaca ("irqchip: Convert generic irqchip locking to guards")
Signed-off-by: Edgar Bonet <bonet@grenoble.cnrs.fr>
---
drivers/irqchip/irq-atmel-aic5.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/drivers/irqchip/irq-atmel-aic5.c b/drivers/irqchip/irq-atmel-aic5.c
index 60b00d2c3d7a..1f14b401f71d 100644
--- a/drivers/irqchip/irq-atmel-aic5.c
+++ b/drivers/irqchip/irq-atmel-aic5.c
@@ -279,7 +279,7 @@ static int aic5_irq_domain_xlate(struct irq_domain *d,
if (ret)
return ret;

- guard(raw_spinlock_irq)(&bgc->lock);
+ guard(raw_spinlock_irqsave)(&bgc->lock);
irq_reg_writel(bgc, *out_hwirq, AT91_AIC5_SSR);
smr = irq_reg_readl(bgc, AT91_AIC5_SMR);
aic_common_set_priority(intspec[2], &smr);
--
2.43.0