On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 12:02:00PM -0800, Seth Arnold wrote: > 4BSD, and probably other unix-ish systems, support interrupt priority > levels to allow selectively blocking off specific interrupts when in > critical code sections. As an example, they could turn off block device > interrupts when dealing with network cards, and they could turn off > network cards and block devices when dealing with the clock.. afaik, linux/x86 doesn't do this. The nearest it comes is specifying the SA_INTERRUPT flag for the ISR, which will disable local interrupts for the duration of that interrupt if requested. x86 does indeed have hardware interrupt priorities (check vol.3 of the arch manual from Intel) but they are not used by linux afaik, notwithstanding "irqtune". There are also NMI interrupts which are not masked by cli/sti pairs, so are effectively the highest priority interrupt you get on x86 regards john -- "...life's not a paragraph and death i think is no parenthesis" - e. e. cummings -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
