Can someone explain when an interrupt is masked and when not. I am trying to understand if there any subtle race conditions in ide-cd, because I have problems with my cd writer, and I have tracked it down to what looks like the hardware doing something strange (busy gets cleared, but then drq gets set after this point). However, the strangeness could possibly be explained away if in certain circumstances the Interrupt handling was re-entered. When an interrupt occurs, it appears that the code does a lot of things in ide_intr, including several spin_lock_irqsave and spin_unlock_irqrestore pairs before calling local_irq_enable. Is it possible (but maybe unlikely) that if the hardware had the irq asserted at the point of local_irq_enable that it could re-interrupt? Can it do it before then? If not, what do these spin_lock_irqsave and spin_unlock_irqrestore pairs prevent happening if the interrupt is disabled - is it just the smp case? I found some text that described how interrupts where handled initially (via irq_action tables), but have been unable to find anything that explains whats happening inside the interrupt handling routine. -- Alan Chandler alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Gandhi -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
