On Thursday 12 September 2013 08:26 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote: > On Thu, 12 Sep 2013, Santosh Shilimkar wrote: >> On Thursday 12 September 2013 06:22 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote: >>> Now the real question is, how that expansion mechanism is supposed to >>> work. There are two possible scenarios: >>> >>> 1) Expand the number of handled interrupts beyond the GIC capacity: >>> >>> That requires a mechanism in CROSSBAR to map several CROSSBAR >>> interrupts to a particular GIC interrupt and provide a demux >>> mechanism to invoke the shared handlers. >>> >> This is not possible in hardware and not supported. Hardware has >> no notion of muxing multiple IRQ's to generate 1 IRQ or ack etc >> functionality. Its a simple MUX to tie knots between input and output >> wires. > > It's not a MUX. It's a ROUTING mechanism. That's similar to the > mechanisms which are used by MSI[X]. We assign arbitrary interrupt > numbers to a device and route them to some underlying limited hardware > interrupt controller. > >>> 2) Provide a mapping mechanism between possibly 250 interrupt numbers >>> and a limitation of a total 160 active interrupts by the underlying >>> GIC. >>> >> This is the need and problem we are trying to solve. > > Let me summarize: > > - GIC supports up to 160 interrupts > > - CROSSBAR supports up to 250 interrupts > > - CROSSBAR routes up to 160 out of 250 interrupts to the GIC ones > > - Drivers request a CROSSBAR interrupt number which must be mapped > to some arbitrary available GIC irq number > Correct. > So basically the CROSSBAR mechanism is pretty much the same as MSI[X] > just in a different flavour and with a different set of semantics and > limitations, i.e. poor mans MSI[X] with a new level of bogosity. > > So if CROSSBAR is going to be the new fangled SoC MSI[X] long term > equivalent then you better provide some infrastructure for that and > make the drivers ready to use it. Maybe check with the PCI/MSI folks > to share some of the interfaces. > > If that whole thing is another onetime HW designers wet dream, then > please go back to the limited but completely functional (Who is going > to use more than 160 peripheral interrupts????) device tree model. I > really have no interest to support hardware designer brain farts. > Thanks for clear NAK for irqchip approach. I should have looped you in the discussion where I was also suggesting against the irqchip approach. We will try to look at MSI stuff but if its get too complicated am going to fall-back to the initial probe based approach to achieve the functionality. Thanks again for clear direction and useful discussion. Regards, Santosh -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
