10.2. Installing an Interrupt HandlerIf you want to actually "see" interrupts being generated, writing to the hardware device isn't enough; a software handler must be configured in the system. If the Linux kernel hasn't been told to expect your interrupt, it simply acknowledges and ignores it. Interrupt lines are a precious and often limited resource, particularly when there are only 15 or 16 of them. The kernel keeps a registry of interrupt lines, similar to the registry of I/O ports. A module is expected to request an interrupt channel (or IRQ, for interrupt request) before using it and to release it when finished. In many situations, modules are also expected to be able to share interrupt lines with other drivers, as we will see. The following functions, declared in <linux/interrupt.h>, implement the interrupt registration interface: int request_irq(unsigned int irq,The value returned from request_irq to the requesting function is either 0 to indicate success or a negative error code, as usual. It's not uncommon for the function to return -EBUSY to signal that another driver is already using the requested interrupt line. The arguments to the functions are as follows:
The bits that can be set in flags are as follows:
The interrupt handler can be installed either at driver initialization or when the device is first opened. Although installing the interrupt handler from within the module's initialization function might sound like a good idea, it often isn't, especially if your device does not share interrupts. Because the number of interrupt lines is limited, you don't want to waste them. You can easily end up with more devices in your computer than there are interrupts. If a module requests an IRQ at initialization, it prevents any other driver from using the interrupt, even if the device holding it is never used. Requesting the interrupt at device open, on the other hand, allows some sharing of resources.It is possible, for example, to run a frame grabber on the same interrupt as a modem, as long as you don't use the two devices at the same time. It is quite common for users to load the module for a special device at system boot, even if the device is rarely used. A data acquisition gadget might use the same interrupt as the second serial port. While it's not too hard to avoid connecting to your Internet service provider (ISP) during data acquisition, being forced to unload a module in order to use the modem is really unpleasant.The correct place to call request_irq is when the device is first opened, before the hardware is instructed to generate interrupts. The place to call free_irq is the last time the device is closed, after the hardware is told not to interrupt the processor any more. The disadvantage of this technique is that you need to keep a per-device open count so that you know when interrupts can be disabled. This discussion notwithstanding, short requests its interrupt line at load time. This was done so that you can run the test programs without having to run an extra process to keep the device open. short, therefore, requests the interrupt from within its initialization function (short_init) instead of doing it in short_open, as a real device driver would.The interrupt requested by the following code is short_irq. The actual assignment of the variable (i.e., determining which IRQ to use) is shown later, since it is not relevant to the current discussion. short_base is the base I/O address of the parallel interface being used; register 2 of the interface is written to enable interrupt reporting. if (short_irq >= 0) {The code shows that the handler being installed is a fast handler(SA_INTERRUPT), doesn't support interrupt sharing (SA_SHIRQ is missing), and doesn't contribute to system entropy (SA_SAMPLE_RANDOM is missing, too). The outb call then enables interrupt reporting for the parallel port.For what it's worth, the i386 and x86_64 architectures define a function for querying the availability of an interrupt line: int can_request_irq(unsigned int irq, unsigned long flags);This function returns a nonzero value if an attempt to allocate the given interrupt succeeds. Note, however, that things can always change between calls to can_request_irq and request_irq. 10.2.1. The /proc InterfaceWhenever a hardware interrupt reaches the processor, an internal counter is incremented, providing a way to check whether the device is working as expected. Reported interrupts are shown in /proc/interrupts. The following snapshot was taken on a two-processor Pentium system: root@montalcino:/bike/corbet/write/ldd3/src/short# m /proc/interruptsThe first column is the IRQ number. You can see from the IRQs that are missing that the file shows only interrupts corresponding to installed handlers. For example, the first serial port (which uses interrupt number 4) is not shown, indicating that the modem isn't being used. In fact, even if the modem had been used earlier but wasn't in use at the time of the snapshot, it would not show up in the file; the serial ports are well behaved and release their interrupt handlers when the device is closed.The /proc/interrupts display shows how many interrupts have been delivered to each CPU on the system. As you can see from the output, the Linux kernel generally handles interrupts on the first CPU as a way of maximizing cache locality.[1] The last two columns give information on the programmable interrupt controller that handles the interrupt (and that a driver writer does not need to worry about), and the name(s) of the device(s) that have registered handlers for the interrupt (as specified in the dev_name argument to request_irq). [1] Although, some larger systems explicitly use interrupt The /proc tree contains another interrupt-related file, /proc/stat; sometimes you'll find one file more useful and sometimes you'll prefer the other. /proc/stat records several low-level statistics about system activity, including (but not limited to) the number of interrupts received since system boot. Each line of stat begins with a text string that is the key to the line; the intr mark is what we are looking for. The following (truncated) snapshot was taken shortly after the previous one: intr 5167833 5154006 2 0 2 4907 0 2 68 4 0 4406 9291 50 0 0The first number is the total of all interrupts, while each of the others represents a single IRQ line, starting with interrupt 0. All of the counts are summed across all processors in the system. This snapshot shows that interrupt number 4 has been used 4907 times, even though no handler is currently installed. If the driver you're testing acquires and releases the interrupt at each open and close cycle, you may find /proc/stat more useful than /proc/interrupts.Another difference between the two files is that interrupts is not architecture dependent (except, perhaps, for a couple of lines at the end), whereas stat is; the number of fields depends on the hardware underlying the kernel. The number of available interrupts varies from as few as 15 on the SPARC to as many as 256 on the IA-64 and a few other systems. It's interesting to note that the number of interrupts defined on the x86 is currently 224, not 16 as you may expect; this, as explained in include/asm-i386/irq.h, depends on Linux using the architectural limit instead of an implementation-specific limit (such as the 16 interrupt sources of the old-fashioned PC interrupt controller).The following is a snapshot of /proc/interrupts taken on an IA-64 system. As you can see, besides different hardware routing of common interrupt sources, the output is very similar to that from the 32-bit system shown earlier. CPU0 CPU1 10.2.2. Autodetecting the IRQ NumberOne of the most challenging problems for a driver at initialization time can be how to determine which IRQ line is going to be used by the device. The driver needs the information in order to correctly install the handler. Even though a programmer could require the user to specify the interrupt number at load time, this is a bad practice, because most of the time the user doesn't know the number, either because he didn't configure the jumpers or because the device is jumperless. Most users want their hardware to "just work" and are not interested in issues like interrupt numbers. So autodetection of the interrupt number is a basic requirement for driver usability.Sometimes autodetection depends on the knowledge that some devices feature a default behavior that rarely, if ever, changes. In this case, the driver might assume that the default values apply. This is exactly how short behaves by default with the parallel port. The implementation is straightforward, as shown by short itself: if (short_irq < 0) /* not yet specified: force the default on */The code assigns the interrupt number according to the chosen base I/O address, while allowing the user to override the default at load time with something like: insmod ./short.ko irq=xshort_base defaults to 0x378, so short_irq defaults to 7.Some devices are more advanced in design and simply "announce" which interrupt they're going to use. In this case, the driver retrieves the interrupt number by reading a status byte from one of the device's I/O ports or PCI configuration space. When the target device is one that has the ability to tell the driver which interrupt it is going to use, autodetecting the IRQ number just means probing the device, with no additional work required to probe the interrupt. Most modern hardware works this way, fortunately; for example, the PCI standard solves the problem by requiring peripheral devices to declare what interrupt line(s) they are going to use. The PCI standard is discussed in Chapter 12.Unfortunately, not every device is programmer friendly, and autodetection might require some probing. The technique is quite simple: the driver tells the device to generate interrupts and watches what happens. If everything goes well, only one interrupt line is activated.Although probing is simple in theory, the actual implementation might be unclear. We look at two ways to perform the task: calling kernel-defined helper functions and implementing our own version. 10.2.2.1 Kernel-assisted probingThe Linux kernel offers a low-level facility for probing the interrupt number. It works for only nonshared interrupts, but most hardware that is capable of working in a shared interrupt mode provides better ways of finding the configured interrupt number anyway. The facility consists of two functions, declared in <linux/interrupt.h> (which also describes the probing machinery):
The programmer should be careful to enable interrupts on the device after the call to probe_irq_on and to disable them before calling probe_irq_off. Additionally, you must remember to service the pending interrupt in your device after probe_irq_off.The short module demonstrates how to use such probing. If you load the module with probe=1, the following code is executed to detect your interrupt line, provided pins 9 and 10 of the parallel connector are bound together: int count = 0;Note the use of udelay before calling probe_irq_off. Depending on the speed of your processor, you may have to wait for a brief period to give the interrupt time to actually be delivered.Probing might be a lengthy task. While this is not true for short, probing a frame grabber, for example, requires a delay of at least 20 ms (which is ages for the processor), and other devices might take even longer. Therefore, it's best to probe for the interrupt line only once, at module initialization, independently of whether you install the handler at device open (as you should) or within the initialization function (which is not recommended).It's interesting to note that on some platforms (PowerPC, M68k, most MIPS implementations, and both SPARC versions) probing is unnecessary, and, therefore, the previous functions are just empty placeholders, sometimes called "useless ISA nonsense." On other platforms, probing is implemented only for ISA devices. Anyway, most architectures define the functions (even if they are empty) to ease porting existing device drivers. 10.2.2.2 Do-it-yourself probingProbing can also be implemented in the driver itself without too much trouble. It is a rare driver that must implement its own probing, but seeing how it works gives some insight into the process. To that end, the short module performs do-it-yourself detection of the IRQ line if it is loaded with probe=2.The mechanism is the same as the one described earlier: enable all unused interrupts, then wait and see what happens. We can, however, exploit our knowledge of the device. Often a device can be configured to use one IRQ number from a set of three or four; probing just those IRQs enables us to detect the right one, without having to test for all possible IRQs. The short implementation assumes that 3, 5, 7, and 9 are the only possible IRQ values. These numbers are actually the values that some parallel devices allow you to select.The following code probes by testing all "possible" interrupts and looking at what happens. The trials array lists the IRQs to try and has 0 as the end marker; the tried array is used to keep track of which handlers have actually been registered by this driver. int trials[ ] = {3, 5, 7, 9, 0};You might not know in advance what the "possible" IRQ values are. In that case, you need to probe all the free interrupts, instead of limiting yourself to a few trials[ ]. To probe for all interrupts, you have to probe from IRQ 0 to IRQ NR_IRQS-1, where NR_IRQS is defined in <asm/irq.h> and is platform dependent.Now we are missing only the probing handler itself. The handler's role is to update short_irq according to which interrupts are actually received. A 0 value in short_irq means "nothing yet," while a negative value means "ambiguous." These values were chosen to be consistent with probe_irq_off and to allow the same code to call either kind of probing within short.c. irqreturn_t short_probing(int irq, void *dev_id, struct pt_regs *regs)The arguments to the handler are described later. Knowing that irq is the interrupt being handled should be sufficient to understand the function just shown. 10.2.3. Fast and Slow HandlersOlder versions of the Linux kernel took great pains to distinguish between "fast" and "slow" interrupts. Fast interrupts were those that could be handled very quickly, whereas handling slow interrupts took significantly longer. Slow interrupts could be sufficiently demanding of the processor, and it was worthwhile to reenable interrupts while they were being handled. Otherwise, tasks requiring quick attention could be delayed for too long.In modern kernels, most of the differences between fast and slow interrupts have disappeared. There remains only one: fast interrupts (those that were requested with the SA_INTERRUPT flag) are executed with all other interrupts disabled on the current processor. Note that other processors can still handle interrupts, although you will never see two processors handling the same IRQ at the same time.So, which type of interrupt should your driver use? On modern systems, SA_INTERRUPT is intended only for use in a few, specific situations such as timer interrupts. Unless you have a strong reason to run your interrupt handler with other interrupts disabled, you should not use SA_INTERRUPT.This description should satisfy most readers, although someone with a taste for hardware and some experience with her computer might be interested in going deeper. If you don't care about the internal details, you can skip to the next section. 10.2.3.1 The internals of interrupt handling on the x86This description has been extrapolated from arch/i386/kernel/irq.c, arch/i386/kernel/apic.c, arch/i386/kernel/entry.S, arch/i386/kernel/i8259.c, and include/asm-i386/hw_irq.h as they appear in the 2.6 kernels; although the general concepts remain the same, the hardware details differ on other platforms. The lowest level of interrupt handling can be found in entry.S, an assembly-language file that handles much of the machine-level work. By way of a bit of assembler trickery and some macros, a bit of code is assigned to every possible interrupt. In each case, the code pushes the interrupt number on the stack and jumps to a common segment, which calls do_IRQ, defined in irq.c.The first thing do_IRQ does is to acknowledge the interrupt so that the interrupt controller can go on to other things. It then obtains a spinlock for the given IRQ number, thus preventing any other CPU from handling this IRQ. It clears a couple of status bits (including one called IRQ_WAITING that we'll look at shortly) and then looks up the handler(s) for this particular IRQ. If there is no handler, there's nothing to do; the spinlock is released, any pending software interrupts are handled, and do_IRQ returns. Usually, however, if a device is interrupting, there is at least one handler registered for its IRQ as well. The function handle_IRQ_event is called to actually invoke the handlers. If the handler is of the slow variety (SA_INTERRUPT is not set), interrupts are reenabled in the hardware, and the handler is invoked. Then it's just a matter of cleaning up, running software interrupts, and getting back to regular work. The "regular work" may well have changed as a result of an interrupt (the handler could wake_up a process, for example), so the last thing that happens on return from an interrupt is a possible rescheduling of the processor.Probing for IRQs is done by setting the IRQ_WAITING status bit for each IRQ that currently lacks a handler. When the interrupt happens, do_IRQ clears that bit and then returns, because no handler is registered. probe_irq_off, when called by a driver, needs to search for only the IRQ that no longer has IRQ_WAITING set. |
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