IRQ thread timeouts and affinity

[Jon Hunter]

On 10/10/2025 15:54, Thierry Reding wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2025 at 03:38:59PM +0100, Jon Hunter wrote:
>>
>> On 10/10/2025 15:18, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>
>>> CPU hotplug is the main area of concern, and I'm pretty sure it breaks
>>> this distribution mechanism (or the other way around). Another thing
>>> is that if firmware isn't aware that 1:N interrupts can (or should)
>>> wake-up a CPU from sleep, bad things will happen. Given that nobody
>>> uses 1:N, you can bet that any bit of privileged SW (TF-A,
>>> hypervisors) is likely to be buggy (I've already spotted bugs in KVM
>>> around this).
>>
>> Thierry, do we ever hotplug CPUs on this device? If not, I am wondering if
>> something like this, for now, could only be enabled for devices that don't
>> hotplug CPUs. Maybe tied to the kernel config (ie. CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU)? Just
>> a thought ...
> 
> I've only had limited exposure to this, so I don't know all of the use-
> cases. People can buy these devices and do anything they want with it,
> so I think we have to account for the general case.

Yes, but the point I was trying to make that you can prevent this from 
being used if CPU hotplug is enabled in the kernel and initially limit 
to configurations where this feature would/could be enabled. So you take 
CPU hotplug out of the equation (initially). Of course someone can hack 
the kernel and do what they want, but there is nothing you can do about 
that.

Jon

-- 
nvpublic