• Maciej W. Rozycki's avatar
    x86: I/O APIC: Never configure IRQ2 · af174783
    Maciej W. Rozycki authored
    There is no such entity as ISA IRQ2.  The ACPI spec does not make it
    explicitly clear, but does not preclude it either -- all it says is ISA
    legacy interrupts are identity mapped by default (subject to overrides),
    but it does not state whether IRQ2 exists or not.  As a result if there is
    no IRQ0 override, then IRQ2 is normally initialised as an ISA interrupt,
    which implies an edge-triggered line, which is unmasked by default as this
    is what we do for edge-triggered I/O APIC interrupts so as not to miss an
    edge.
    
    To the best of my knowledge it is useless, as IRQ2 has not been in use
    since the PC/AT as back then it was taken by the 8259A cascade interrupt
    to the slave, with the line position in the slot rerouted to newly-created
    IRQ9.  No device could thus make use of this line with the pair of 8259A
    chips.  Now in theory INTIN2 of the I/O APIC may be usable, but the
    interrupt of the device wired to it would not be available in the PIC mode
    at all, so I seriously doubt if anybody decided to reuse it for a regular
    device.
    
    However there are two common uses of INTIN2.  One is for IRQ0, with an
    ACPI interrupt override (or its equivalent in the MP table).  But in this
    case IRQ2 is gone entirely with INTIN0 left vacant.  The other one is for
    an 8959A ExtINTA cascade.  In this case IRQ0 goes to INTIN0 and if ACPI is
    used INTIN2 is assumed to be IRQ2 (there is no override and ACPI has no
    way to report ExtINTA interrupts).  This is where a problem happens.
    
    The problem is INTIN2 is configured as a native APIC interrupt, with a
    vector assigned and the mask cleared.  And the line may indeed get active
    and inject interrupts if the master 8959A has its timer interrupt enabled
    (it might happen for other interrupts too, but they are normally masked in
    the process of rerouting them to the I/O APIC).  There are two cases where
    it will happen:
    
    * When the I/O APIC NMI watchdog is enabled.  This is actually a misnomer
      as the watchdog pulses are delivered through the 8259A to the LINT0
      inputs of all the local APICs in the system.  The implication is the
      output of the master 8259A goes high and low repeatedly, signalling
      interrupts to INTIN2 which is enabled too!
    
      [The origin of the name is I think for a brief period during the
      development we had a capability in our code to configure the watchdog to
      use an I/O APIC input; that would be INTIN2 in this scenario.]
    
    * When the native route of IRQ0 via INTIN0 fails for whatever reason -- as
      it happens with the system considered here.  In this scenario the timer
      pulse is delivered through the 8259A to LINT0 input of the local APIC of
      the bootstrap processor, quite similarly to how is done for the watchdog
      described above.  The result is, again, INTIN2 receives these pulses
      too.  Rafael's system used to escape this scenario, because an incorrect
      IRQ0 override would occupy INTIN2 and prevent it from being unmasked.
    
    My conclusion is IRQ2 should be excluded from configuration in all the
    cases and the current exception for ACPI systems should be lifted.  The
    reason being the exception not only being useless, but harmful as well.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMaciej W. Rozycki <macro@linux-mips.org>
    Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>
    Cc: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>
    Cc: Andreas Herrmann <andreas.herrmann3@amd.com>
    Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    af174783
io_apic_64.c 58.2 KB