Re: [RFC][PATCH] irq: remove IRQF_DISABLED

Andrew Morton
2009-03-02T17:56:36Z

On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:21:17 +0100 Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:

>
> People are playing odd games with IRQF_DISABLED, remove it.
>
> Its not reliable, since shared interrupt lines could disable it for you,
> and its possible and allowed for archs to disable IRQs to limit IRQ nesting.
>
> Therefore, simply mandate that _ALL_ IRQ handlers are run with IRQs disabled.
>
> [ This _should_ not break anything, since we've mandated that IRQ handlers
> _must_ be able to deal with this for a _long_ time ]
>
> IRQ handlers should be fast, no if buts and any other exceptions. We also have
> plenty instrumentation to find any offending IRQ latency sources.

Changelog is a bit cruddy. What are these "odd games" and why are they
so serious as to warrant a fairly drastic-looking patch?

Where are these odd games being played, and what are the implications
to those codesites of having their ball taken away? etc.

wrt the patch itself - it would make life easier if we were to leave
the IRQF_DISABLED definition in place for a while. I'm counting 47 new
additions of references to IRQF_DISABLED in linux-next/-mm. It would
grease the wheels a bit were these things (and out-of-tree drivers) to
not instabreak. One could add a nice runtime warning at request_irq()
time, leave that in place until everything is fixed up.