Re: [PATCH] Prevent nested interrupts when the IRQ stack is near overflowing v2

Ingo Molnar
2010-03-25T16:27:49Z

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

[...]
>
> Now, it's also true that our IRQ infrastructure handlers _could_ be smarter,
> and make the whole problem less likely to happen.
>
> In particular, it's probably true that especially on modern hardware with
> multiple cores, and especially when you do _not_ have irq sharing (which is
> the common case these days for things like network drivers that can use
> MSI), we really would be better off having the irq disabled over the whole
> thing, and on some interrupt controllers it might even be worth it to do the
> old optimization of not masking-and-acking, but just acking.

Yes.

> But see above. This is _not_ something that a driver can do any more. They
> don't know whether the interrupt might end up being shared. Just blindly
> setting IRAF_DISABLED in a driver is _not_ the answer. But being smarter in
> the generic irq handler code might work.
>
> And then, what we could do, is to mark the drivers that absolutely _must_ be
> able to nest specially. Like the IDE driver when in PIO mode. Or maybe the
> SCSI drivers, if they still depend on that timer interrupt happening while
> they are busy.

I think the patch as posted solves a real problem, but also perpetuates a bad
situation.

At minimum we should print a (one-time) warning that some badness occured.
That would push us either in the direction of improving drivers, or towards
improving the generic code.

Thanks,

Ingo