The notion of an IRQ conflict is almost synonymous with the PC architecture. In general, IRQ lines on the PC have not been able to serve more than one device, and there have never been enough of them. As a result, frustrated users have often spent much time with their computer case open, trying to find a way to make all of their hardware play well together.
But, in fact, there is nothing in the design of the hardware itself that says that interrupt lines cannot be shared. The problems are on the software side. With the arrival of the PCI bus, the writers of system software have had to work a little harder, since all PCI interrupts can explicitly be shared. So Linux supports shared interrupts—and on all buses where it makes any sense, not just the PCI. Thus, suitably aware drivers for ISA devices can also share an IRQ line.
The question of interrupt sharing under the ISA bus brings in the issue of level-triggered versus edge-triggered interrupt lines. Although the former kind of interrupt reporting is safe with regard to sharing, it may lead to software lockup if not handled correctly. Edge-triggered interrupts, on the other hand, are not safe with regard to sharing; ISA is edge triggered, because this signaling is easier to implement at hardware level and therefore was the common choice in the 1980s. This issue is unrelated to electrical signal levels; in order to support sharing, the line must be able to be driven active by multiple sources whether it is level triggered or edge triggered.
With a level-triggered interrupt line, the peripheral device asserts the IRQ signal until software clears the pending interrupt (usually by writing to a device register); therefore, if several devices pull the line active, the CPU will signal an interrupt as soon as the IRQ is enabled until all drivers have serviced their devices. This behavior is safe with regard to sharing but may lead to lockup if a driver fails to clear its interrupt source.
When using edge-triggered interrupts, on the other hand, interrupts may be lost: if one device pulls the line active for too long a time, when another device pulls the line active no edge will be generated, and the processor will ignore the second request. A shared handler may just not see the interrupt, and if its hardware doesn’t deassert the IRQ line no other interrupt will be notified for either shared device.
For this reason, even if interrupt sharing is supported under ISA, it may not function properly; while some devices pull the IRQ line active for a single clock cycle, other devices are not so well behaved and may cause great pains to the driver writer who tries to share the IRQ. We won’t go any deeper into this issue; for the rest of this section we assume that either the host bus supports sharing or that you know what you are doing.
To develop a driver that can manage a shared interrupt line, some details need to be considered. As discussed later, some of the features described in this chapter are not available for devices using interrupt sharing. Whenever possible, it’s better to support sharing because it presents fewer problems for the final user. In some cases (e.g., when working with the PCI bus), interrupt sharing is mandatory.
Shared interrupts are installed through request_irq just like nonshared ones, but there are two differences:
The kernel keeps a list of shared handlers associated with the
interrupt, like a driver’s signature, and dev_id
differentiates between them. If two drivers were to register
NULL as their signature on the same interrupt,
things might get mixed up at unload time, causing the kernel to oops
when an interrupt arrived. For this reason, modern kernels will
complain loudly if passed a NULL
dev_id when registering shared interrupts.
When a shared interrupt is requested, request_irq succeeds if either the interrupt line is free or any handlers already registered for that line have also specified that the IRQ is to be shared. With 2.0 kernels, it was also necessary that all handlers for a shared interrupt were either fast or slow—the two modes could not be mixed.
Whenever two or more drivers are sharing an interrupt line and the
hardware interrupts the processor on that line, the kernel invokes
every handler registered for that interrupt, passing each its own
dev_id. Therefore, a shared handler must be able to
recognize its own interrupts, and should quickly exit when its own
device has not interrupted.
If you need to probe for your device before requesting the IRQ line, the kernel can’t help you. No probing function is available for shared handlers. The standard probing mechanism works if the line being used is free, but if the line is already held by another driver with sharing capabilities, the probe will fail, even if your driver would have worked perfectly.
The only available technique for probing shared lines, then, is the do-it-yourself way. The driver should request every possible IRQ line as a shared handler and then see where interrupts are reported. The difference between that and do-it-yourself probing is that the probing handler must check with the device to see that the interrupt actually occurred, because it could have been called in response to another device interrupting on a shared line.
Releasing the handler is performed in the normal way, using
release_irq. Here the dev_id
argument is used to select the correct handler to release from the
list of shared handlers for the interrupt. That’s why the
dev_id pointer must be unique.
A driver using a shared handler needs to be careful about one more thing: it can’t play with enable_irq or disable_irq. If it does, things might go haywire for other devices sharing the line. In general, the programmer must remember that his driver doesn’t own the IRQ, and its behavior should be more “social” than is necessary if one owns the interrupt line.
As suggested earlier, when the kernel receives an interrupt, all the registered handlers are invoked. A shared handler must be able to distinguish between interrupts that it needs to handle and interrupts generated by other devices.
Loading short with the option
shared=1 installs the following handler instead of
the default:
void short_sh_interrupt(int irq, void *dev_id, struct pt_regs *regs)
{
int value, written;
struct timeval tv;
/* If it wasn't short, return immediately */
value = inb(short_base);
if (!(value & 0x80)) return;
/* clear the interrupting bit */
outb(value & 0x7F, short_base);
/* the rest is unchanged */
do_gettimeofday(&tv);
written = sprintf((char *)short_head,"%08u.%06u\n",
(int)(tv.tv_sec % 100000000), (int)(tv.tv_usec));
short_incr_bp(&short_head, written);
wake_up_interruptible(&short_queue); /* wake any reading process */
}An explanation is due here. Since the parallel port has no “interrupt-pending” bit to check, the handler uses the ACK bit for this purpose. If the bit is high, the interrupt being reported is for short, and the handler clears the bit.
The handler resets the bit by zeroing the high bit of the parallel interface’s data port—short assumes that pins 9 and 10 are connected together. If one of the other devices sharing the IRQ with short generates an interrupt, short sees that its own line is still inactive and does nothing.
A full-featured driver probably splits the work into top and bottom
halves, of course, but that’s easy to add and does not have any impact
on the code that implements sharing. A real driver would also likely
use the dev_id argument to determine which, of
possibly many, devices might be interrupting.
Note that if you are using a printer (instead of the jumper wire) to test interrupt management with short, this shared handler won’t work as advertised, because the printer protocol doesn’t allow for sharing, and the driver can’t know whether the interrupt was from the printer or not.
Installing shared handlers in the system doesn’t affect
/proc/stat, which doesn’t even know about
handlers. However, /proc/interrupts changes
slightly.
All the handlers installed for the same interrupt number appear on the
same line of /proc/interrupts. The following
output shows how shared interrupt handlers are displayed:
CPU0 CPU1 0: 22114216 22002860 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 135401 136582 IO-APIC-edge keyboard 2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade 5: 5162076 5160039 IO-APIC-level eth0 9: 0 0 IO-APIC-level acpi, es1370 10: 310450 312222 IO-APIC-level aic7xxx 12: 460372 471747 IO-APIC-edge PS/2 Mouse 13: 1 0 XT-PIC fpu 15: 1367555 1322398 IO-APIC-edge ide1 NMI: 44117004 44117004 LOC: 44116987 44116986 ERR: 0
The shared interrupt line here is IRQ 9; the active handlers are listed on one line, separated by commas. Here the power management subsystem (“acpi”) is sharing this IRQ with the sound card (“es1370”). The kernel is unable to distinguish interrupts from these two sources, and will invoke each interrupt handlers in the driver for each interrupt.
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