Re: QUESTION: Network hangs with BP6 and 2.4.x kernels, hardware

Linus Torvalds
2001-01-13T00:36:39Z

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> > interrupt controllers (io-apic definitely included). Drivers would
> > generally be better off if they disabled their own chip from sending
> > interrupts, rather than disabling the interrupt line the chip is on.
>
> That doesn't work very well because the device irq can arrive a measurable
> number of clocks after you disable it on the source and there is no way to
> say 'and be sure the stupid thing has propogated the apic bus'

I agree. Asynchronous buses are nasty that way. However, if your "locking"
is based on device state, you can still do it: you just have to have an
internal device protocol. The simplest example of this is:

interrupt_handler()
{
status = readl(dev->status);
if (status & MY_IRQ_DISABLE)
return;

}

{
status = readl(dev->status);
writel(dev->status, status | MY_IRQ_DISABLE);
spin_lock();
.. critical region ..
spin_unlock();
writel(dev->status, status);
}

Notice how the above does NOT guarantee that the physical interrupt might
not be "in flight". It does, however, synchronize other ways, simply by
virtue of using the _synchronous_ bus (PCI, in this case) to figure out
when the asynchronous bus (interrupts) has a bogus event.

Linus