Lijun
Jun Sun wrote:
On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 10:39:19AM -0500, Lijun Chen wrote:
Thanks a lot, Dominic and Ralf.
So interrupts and a few exception conditions are maskable and preemptable.
The machine-level exceptions are non-maskable.If ever multiple exceptions occur
at the same time, cpu picks the highest priority one.
But in the MIPS64 spec, it says the EXL bit is set when any exception other than Reset,
Soft reset, NMI or Cache Error exception are taken. Does this mean Cache error can
preempt whatever else is going on except for Reset and NMI?
I think so. Usually when cache error happens you are dead. For bcm1250 there is a cache error handler which works around a hw bug.
I believe the workaround code is in the linux-mips.org tree.
My intention is to write some information to a kernel buffer when cache and bus
error exceptions occur. If they use the common buffer and a spin_lock() is used before
writing, will this cause dead lock if kernel is handling bus error while a cache error
occurs?
It will be a deadlock only if another exception happens and you try
to acquire the lock while you are already in the middle of spin_lock()/spin_unlock(). You should use spin_lock() in a scope as small as possible.
BTW, you may my tiby tracing patch handy for something like this.
http://linux.junsun.net/patches/generic/experimental/040316.a-jstrace.patch
Jun
