The ARM GIC interrupt controller offers per CPU interrupts (PPIs),
which are usually used to connect local timers to each core.
Each CPU has its own private interface to the GIC,
and only sees the PPIs that are directly connect to it.
While these timers are separate devices and have a separate
interrupt line to a core, they all use the same IRQ number.
For these devices, request_irq() is not the right API as it
assumes that an IRQ number is visible by a number of CPUs
(through the affinity setting), but makes it very awkward to
express that an IRQ number can be handled by all CPUs, and
yet be a different interrupt line on each CPU, requiring a
different dev_id cookie to be passed back to the handler.
The *_percpu_irq() functions is designed to overcome these
limitations, by providing a per-cpu dev_id vector:
int request_percpu_irq(unsigned int irq, irq_handler_t handler,
const char *devname, void __percpu *percpu_dev_id);
void free_percpu_irq(unsigned int, void __percpu *);
int setup_percpu_irq(unsigned int irq, struct irqaction *new);
void remove_percpu_irq(unsigned int irq, struct irqaction *act);
void enable_percpu_irq(unsigned int irq);