Re: Question about SPIs' interrupt trigger type restrictions

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Wed May 25 2022 - 15:16:29 EST


On 2022-05-25 11:01, richard clark wrote:
Hi Marc,

For below code snippet about SPI interrupt trigger type:

static int gic_set_type(struct irq_data *d, unsigned int type)
{
...
/* SPIs have restrictions on the supported types */
if ((range == SPI_RANGE || range == ESPI_RANGE) &&
type != IRQ_TYPE_LEVEL_HIGH && type != IRQ_TYPE_EDGE_RISING)
return -EINVAL;
...
}

We have a device at hand whose interrupt type is SPI, Falling edge
will trigger the interrupt. But the request_irq(50, handler,
IRQ_TYPE_EDGE_FALLING, ...) will return -EINVAL.

The question is, why must the SPI interrupt use IRQ_TYPE_EDGE_RISING
instead of IRQ_TYPE_EDGE_FALLING?

Because that's what the GIC architecture[1] says. From section 1.2.1 "Interrupt Types":

"An interrupt that is edge-triggered has the following property:
• It is asserted on detection of a rising edge of an interrupt signal and then, regardless of the state of the signal, remains asserted until the interrupt is acknowledged by software."

External signals with the wrong polarity may need external logic to invert them (which might even be offered by the GIC implementation itself, e.g. [2]), but the programmer's model neither knows nor cares about such details, it only knows notions of "edge-triggered" and "level-sensitive", where from its point of view the asserted states are rising and high respectively.

Robin.

[1] https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ihi0069/latest
[2] https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100336/0106/components-and-configuration/spi-collator/spi-collator-wires?lang=en