Christoph Schmitz
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---The symptom: Compaq leverages IRQ 13, usually used to raise a floating point exception on Intel pre-Pentium systems, to trigger management interrupts (i.e. on fan failure, etc.). This interrupt level is usually NOT shareable, but through some magic, we managed to register an ISR for our management driver on IRQ 13. In the kernel 2.2.x, this worked fine for both SMP and UP kernels. On the 2.4.x SMP kernels, we do NOT get any interrupts when using request_irq() for IRQ 13.
Debugging: If you boot the SMP kernel with the 'noapic' parameter, the interrupt works fine. We are aware that IRQ 2 and IRQ 13 will be always routed through the legacy 8259A PIC as opposed to the IO-APIC. If we change the kernel to route IRQ 13 through the APIC, everything works fine. Furthermore, if we route any other working interrupt through the PIC, it does not work. It appears to be related to putting the PIC into auto-EOI mode. The 2.4 SMP kernel puts the PIC in auto-EOI mode while setting up the timer interrupt. See init_8259A(1) in the check_timer routine in arch/i386/kernel/io_apic.c.
Conclusion: PIC and APIC routed interrupts do not coexist peacefully in the 2.4.x SMP kernel. We need to figure out why PIC interrupts don't work with the APIC interrupts enabled, or stop forcing IRQ 2 and 13 to the PIC when APIC interrupts are enabled. As it is right now, you will never see an IRQ 2 or 13 while in APIC mode on the 2.4.x SMP kernel, which makes the code carefully preserving PIC interrupts superfluous. If fixing this kernel flaw turns out to be too involved, at the very least, we would like to suggest the code forcing IRQ's 2 and 13 onto the PIC be removed from the 2.4 kernel. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/