On Sun, 4 Jan 2009 10:54:15 -0800 (PST) Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Since it seems to be the irq auto-probing, then doing it > asynchronously won't help. Not only will it happen only for ports > that you actually have (rather than the number you have configured), > but even if you actually have multiple physical ports, the irq > autoprobing is all serialized (and has to be - it depends on). > > It's serialized by the 'probing_active' mutex. > > In fact, I suspect we should entirely disallow asynchronous irq > probing, because while the probing itself is serialized wrt _other_ > autoprobing, it's not necessarily safe wrt other drivers allocating > interrupts in a non-probing manner. > > So not only should we not bother to do irq autoprobing asynchronously > (because it won't help), we also probably should make sure that there > is no other driver doing any asynchronous "request_irq()" _while_ we > probe. IOW, we should consider the "request_irq()" to be a globally > ordered event, like requesting a major/minor number or registering a > driver. well. or we declare the irq probing stuff "rare" and just make THAT fully serializing.... do a full synchronization before starting a probe (at that point no new async stuff can show up if it wouldn't show up already right now), and be done with it. > > > Does this patch make any difference to you? I'm not at all sure > > > that it's the irq probing, but if it is, then this should make > > > the serial probe go much faster. > > > > it turned it into a 25 msec deal .. pretty good improvement in my > > book. > > Ok, that certainly makes it a non-issue. It's a scary change in the > sense that it's touching code that we _never_ touch, and it's magic > irq autoprobing stuff, but at the same time, 0.1 seconds for testing > whether some spurious irq happens is a pretty ridiculous cost. > Especially since we're only talking legacy ISA interrupts anyway. If > we have screaming interrupts, they'll happen immediately, not after a > tenth of a second. > > That said, I also wonder if we really even need to autoprobe the > interrupts on any modern hardware. Rather than trying to speed up irq > probing, maybe we could figure it out some other way.. The only thing > that matters on 99% of all machines are the one or two standard ports > that normally show up on 2f8h/irq3 and 3f8h/irq4 or something like > that. too bad this stuff isn't PCI enumerated. but if someone really still maintains this code, it could probably be rewritten in a "we think it's likely irq 3. how about we test that. Oh no? then we do expensive probing" kind of way. Right now I don't think I have time for it (this is going to take time.. there's so many weird things with serial ports that it's bound to break stuff in the beginning etc) -- Arjan van de Ven Intel Open Source Technology Centre For development, discussion and tips for power savings, visit http://www.lesswatts.org -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
