Re: kernel BUG at arch/x86/kernel/io_apic_64.c:357!

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Tue Jul 29 2008 - 19:42:34 EST


Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Mike Travis <travis@xxxxxxx> writes:

I didn't follow this from the start but one reason why NR_IRQS based on
NR_CPUS is a bad idea, is the huge (nearly 300Mb) increase in memory usage
(that's mostly wasted.) I believe there's another patch coming real soon
now to make irq allocations dynamic. (I had also hoped to look closer at
your irq abstraction patch you sent a while back. Does that also address
this issue?)

The patch I sent out earlier is one of the key patches needed for killing
NR_IRQS usage in generic code. Which is part of what we need to make this
dynamic.

In systems where the I/O is well balanced with the compute the typical
usage is usually within 16 irqs per core, and at worst 32. That is an old
rule of thumb observation and that makes for reasonable allocations.

I don't have a problem at all with your code that updated the heuristic to
be based on the NR_IOAPICS.

My problem is with Thomas's patch that totally threw out all of our tuned
heuristics and made NR_IRQS=256. Which is ludicrous. Even on 32bit systems
there are cases where 1024 irq sources needed to be supported.

Which is what NR_IRQ_VECTORS is. I goofed slightly in my comments.
irq_vector only needs to be NR_IRQS in size. I think ACPI still needs
NR_IRQ_VECTORS to know how many GSI the kernel can support. The fact they
are not mapped 1-1 right now in the 32bit kernel is unfortunate.

I'm still interested in making Xen's event channel-based interrupts fit better into the rest of the interrupt handling scheme. In particular, event channels map very closely to the x86-64 notion of a vector. There's 1024 of them per domain, and each is bound to a cpu. At the moment, I map them to irqs, which means that I need to allocate around 5-6 irqs per cpu, which makes everything very cluttered. I'd like to map event channels to vectors, and then map vectors to (irq,cpu) tuples.

From what I've seen this is exactly how x86-64 currently has things set up, and I'm interested in making sure that 32-bit does the same thing.

I'm also interested in having vectors being sourced from multiple interrupt controllers. So, some vectors would be sourced from APICs, and other are sourced from event channels. This would be useful for Xen domains which have direct access to hardware (ie, the dom0 control domain in the short term, and disaggregated driver domains later on), and fully emulated domains which have paravirtual drivers.

I haven't studied the current code to see if this notion already exists or not.

While the APIC interrupt model is the most architecturally important for the x86 platform, I'd like to make sure we don't build in the assumption that it's the *only* interrupt model.

J
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