Handling interrupt routing cleanly...

Tarl Neustaedter Tarl.Neustaedter at sun.com
Wed Feb 4 14:25:00 CET 2004


> I seem to be dropping into this conversation late; What do you
> mean that there is a single root for the interrupt tree?

Ah. Never mind, I found it:

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
[...]
 > Each device has it's interrupt.

Plural. We have a number of devices which generate multiple interrupts.
On PCI, that usually means being constrained to four interrupts, but
for on-board devices we can deal with whole bunches of interrupt lines
per device.

 > Each device has an interrupt parent.
 >   If not specified explicitly the interrupt parent is simply up
 >   the device tree but that was not required.

Device-tree parent is default, but not required.

 > An interrupt parent can have an interrupt mapping table
 >   that maps interrupts maps device#/interrupt pairs to ids
 >   consumed by devices up the interrupt tree.

It allows routing interrupts to anywhere else in the device
tree. This construct was added explicitly because of hardware
engineer's tendency to build boards which route interrupts
differently than the datapaths, and we needed some way to
deal with it. Since they weren't going to constrain themselves
to a hierarchical structure for interrupts, we couldn't
constrain the interrupt-map, either.



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