Interrupt prioritization on linux for ppc440

[Shawn Jin]

On 4/15/05, Eugene Surovegin <ebs at ebshome.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 02:36:51PM -0700, Shawn Jin wrote:
> >
> > The home-made interrupt controller PIC supports interrupt priorities
> > and critical/non-critical interrupts. I found that the current kernel
> > doesn't support interrupt priorities.
> 
> Yes, we don't have IRQ priorities on 4xx. Theoretically, they can be
> emulated in get_irq, but I really don't think it's worth it.

Hmmm...that's one way I thought of to implement IRQ priority. Why
isn't it worth it? ppc4xx_pic gets the first irq from the least
significant bit by calling ffs(). So theoretically and maybe
practically some external interrupts will keep UART's interrupt from
being served.

> > Is this observation true? Is
> > there any existing patch to support that?
> 
> I'm not aware of such patch existence.

By googling the Internet I found this patch for i386 architecture
http://home.t-online.de/home/Bernhard_Kuhn/rtirq/20040304/rtirq.html.
This mustn't have been caught sight of by linux mainstream.

Anybody knows if RTAI or RTLinux supports IRQ priorities?

> > I noticed that the implementation of ppc4xx_pic.c disables all
> > critical interrupts during initialization. To support critical
> > interrupts, is it so simple that we change the handler of critical
> > exception from CriticalInput to do_IRQ in head_44x.S?
> 
> No, it's not that simple. Linux doesn't support a notion of critical
> IRQs versus normal ones. Until there is an infrastructure for this, it
> doesn't make any sense to implement 4xx support.

What kind of infrastructure can you think of to support this? ppc440
at least provides some interrupt processing registers (CSSR0/1) to
differentiate critical and non-critical interrupts.

Another confusion about 440GP/GX UIC is the registers VCR (Vector
Configuration Reg) and VR (Vector Reg). They seem to be totally
useless on linux. The interrupt vector is already in the table of
irq_desc[]. Why does the controller have to generate the address?

Thanks for the inputs. Welcome more.

Regards,
-Shawn.