Re: Get rid of IRQF_DISABLED - (was [PATCH] genirq: warn about IRQF_SHARED|IRQF_DISABLED)

From: Andrew Victor
Date: Mon Nov 30 2009 - 15:15:44 EST


hi,

> There is hardware out there (AT91) where
> the timer interrupt is shared with other peripherals, and you end
> up with a mixture of irqs-disabled and irqs-enabled handlers sharing
> the same interrupt.

For the AT91 case I don't think this shouldn't matter.

The AT91's have a priority-level interrupt controller, so:
1. a lower-priority interrupt won't interrupt a higher-priority
2. shared interrupts cannot interrupt each other until irq_finish()
is called (a write to AIC_EOICR)

Since the Timer, DBGU serial port (and other system peripherals) are
on the same priority level they cannot interrupt each other.
(ie, basically as-if always irqs-disabled).

The case of irqs-enabled does means that a higher-priority interrupt
could interrupt [*], but it's not a shared-IRQ in that case.

([*] The system peripherals have the highest priority by default, so
the user would need to override the defaults for this to occur)


Regards,
Andrew Victor
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/