Re: VM86 interrupt emulation breakage and FIXes for 2.6.x kernel series

Linus Torvalds
2004-12-11T18:46:11Z

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> ps: Pavel - the X folks played with several ideas for handling
> interrupts from user space that could be shared, forwarded to user space
> and handled and it always came back to either a small kernel module or
> an interpretable set of descriptions of how to test for and mask the
> IRQ, and in some cases to save several values.

The interpreter idea is somewhat interesting, especially if the "language"
can be actually "compiled" into some threaded format or similar. I suspect
that a number of special devices that you don't want to maintain a
real kernel module for could be handled that way.

However, I also suspect that such a thing would eventually explode with
special cases and support for new features people want, to the point
where it gets quite complex, and a kernel module might be easier after all ;)

Linus