Re: [PATCH v6 2/2] clocksource: add J-Core timer/clocksource driver

[Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 01:51:35PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 05:38:06PM +0100, Mark Rutland wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 10:56:50AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > > On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 10:07:08AM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > > Nominally it uses the same range of hardware interrupt numbers for all
> > > (presently both) cpus, but some of them get delivered to a specific
> > > cpu associated with the event (presently, IPI and timer; IPI is on a
> > > fixed number at synthesis time but timer is runtime configurable)
> > > while others are conceptually deliverable to either cpu (presently
> > > only delivered to cpu0, but that's treated as an implementation
> > > detail).
> > 
> > Given you say it's delivered to the CPU associated with the event (and you have
> > different PIT bases per-cpu), it sounds like your timer interrupt is percpu,
> > it's just that the hwirq number can be chosen by software.
> 
> It's what I would call percpu in the hardware, but I'm not convinced
> that the Linux irq subsystem's "percpu" stuff models it in a way
> that fits the hw, nor that it's in any way necessary.

My understanding was that you used the same hwirq number to handle interrupts
from per-cpu resources being delivered to their relevant CPUs, independently of
each other.

That in my mind is a perfect match.

The only difference, as I've stated a number of times, seems to be that you can
choose the hwirq number from software.

> > > It currently works requesting the irq with flags that ensure the
> > > handler runs on the same cpu it was delivered on, without using any
> > > other percpu irq framework. If you have concerns about ways this could
> > > break and want me to make the drivers do something else, I'm open to
> > > suggestions.
> > 
> > As I suggested, I don't think that this is right, and you need some mechanism
> > to describe to the kernel that the interrupt is percpu (e.g. a flag in the
> > interrupt-specifier in DT).
> 
> Thomas seemed to think it's okay as-is. Can you describe what you
> expect could go wrong by using request_irq rather than the ARM-style
> percpu irq framework?

The percpu irq code is designed to expect a hwirq number being shared by
banked, cpu-local interrupts, the regular request_irq code is not. Even if the
latter happens to work today for your use-case, that is not by design.

Relying on non-deliberate properties of request_irq makes it far harder for the
generic code to be altered in future, with global vs percpu locking,
synchronisation, accounting, etc being broken.

Thanks,
Mark.