[PATCH] ARM: ux500: Initialize irq affinity

[Will Deacon]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 03:27:10PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 12:54:11PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
> > I think this *could* be a problem if, as in Linus's case, some interrupts
> > have a hardcoded affinity enforced by the hardware (i.e. there are sticky bits
> > in the GIC distributor CPU targets registers). If we boot on a CPU that is
> > different from the hardcoded affinity, we could end up initialising an
> > interrupt with multiple targets. I suspect this will just lead to spurious
> > interrupts at the end of the day, but there's a potential performance impact
> > too.
> 
> If we boot on a CPU which is incapable of receiving interrupts from
> attached devices, we have a much larger problem than just affinity.
> We potentially can't initialize those devices until their dependent
> CPU comes online - we certainly can't start to use those devices until
> that happens.

My initial reading of the GIC spec was that you would always be able to
augment the set of targets, but taking another look this doesn't appear to
be the case. So yes, if/when we encounter a platform doing this for a CPU
other than the boot CPU then we'll be in trouble.

> That's something we just don't deal with - and as far as userspace goes,
> trying to set an affinity to just the offline CPU will return an error
> code.

Although we can currently end up reporting that an interrupt is affine only
to an offline CPU (patch 7292/1 fixes this).

> So, if you have interrupts which can only be serviced by a group of CPUs,
> at least one of those CPUs must remain online at all times that those
> dependent devices could produce an interrupt.
> 
> I think what we want instead is for the IRQ subsystem to record on a
> per-IRQ basis which CPUs the interrupt /can/ be routed to, and if:
> 
> 	affinity & cpus_online & allowable_cpus
> 
> becomes empty, the attempt to set the affinity is failed.  Also, a callback
> in the hotplug code to error out if
> 
> 	cpus_online & allowable_cpus & ~offlining_cpu
> 
> would become an empty set.

That looks like a good idea to me. I suggest we wait until somebody builds
such a monster and get them to implement the solution :) (unless the ux500 is
capable of booting on a CPU other than 0?).

Will