EPIC Vs OpenPIC Vs MontaVista

Sarnath Kannan sparc64 at rediffmail.com
Sat Nov 3 00:47:54 EST 2001


Guys,
  I ran into some accidental discoveries
while scanning EPIC code written by Mvista.
  As I said b4 there is a descrepancy with
the OpenPIC register layout and EPIC layout.
But the way Mvista people have programmed EPIC is
good in one sense, bad in other.
  The reason for assigning vector of 16 to PCI
interrupts is because each entry in the "Interrupt Source" is 32 bytes long, 16 * 32 = 512 = 0x200
which equals the difference in offsets between
the std openPIC layout and EPIC register layout.
This 16 has got NOTHING TO DO with NUM_8259_INTERRUPTS.
But Mvista code seems to assume that this feature
is because of NUM_8259_INTERRUPTS. ( See the
#define for SANDPOINT_SIO_IRQ ).
Thus while writing into  Sources[16], mvista code
writes into "sources[0]" in the EPIC reigster layout.
Thus IRQ0 gets initialized to vector 16.
 The "offset" field in "openpic_init" code,
is mainly used to seperate of vector spaces of
various interrupt controllers in the system.
  EPIC manual clearly says that the "Interrupt
Sources" register offset start at 0x50200. mvista
code overwrites the 0x50000-0x50200 fields ( which are
actually reserved as per EPIC manual ). Thus the
reliablity of MVISTA code is a question mark .
I have come across some "Bogus interrupts" while
runing MVISTA code in my box. The above
explan may very well be the reason of why such bogus
interrupts are being generated.

 I seek pardon if my observatons are wrong. Can
MVISTA guys give a proper expln to this ?

Sarnath


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