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Date:      Fri, 15 Dec 2000 13:19:24 -0800 (PST)
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Bernd Walter <ticso@cicely5.cicely.de>
Cc:        alpha@FreeBSD.org, Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>, Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>, =?iso-8859-1?Q?G=E9rard_Roudier?= <groudier@club-internet.fr>
Subject:   Re: mutex/ithread jitters?
Message-ID:  <XFMail.001215131924.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20001215210136.C62048@cicely5.cicely.de>

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On 15-Dec-00 Bernd Walter wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 10:29:38PM +0100, Gérard Roudier wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
>> 
>> > John Baldwin writes:
>> >  > 
>> >  > Sounds like lost interrupts.  Possibly the interrupt isn't being
>> >  > enabled
>> >  > properly after the ithread finishes running the handler.
>> > 
>> > Maybe it is time to accept defeat on squelching interrupts at their source
>> > and leave the IPL raised until the handler is run?
>> 
>> I am not an arch. guy and I will be fixed by jhb for sure :). Thanks by
>> advance Jhon for teaching me. :)
>> 
>> My understanding is that Alpha is actually IPL based and masking using
>> actual level will kill most advantages if threading interrupts, at least
>> for level sensitive. My probably false understanding let me think that
>> result will be increase of interrupt latency without any gain in anything
>> by threading interrupt handlers.
> 
> In my understanding the reason for implementing ithread was not to get
> a better response time but it is neccessary to make use of mutexes for
> interupt processing.
> Maybe it's better schedule an ithread only if we need to block which
> should be unlikely if designed properly and keep IPL raised if
> sensefull for the platform.

This is sort of what light weight context switches for ithreads will do.

> But I'm far away from being capable of implementing this.
> 
> Anyway - if the 4100 has a similar behavour as the PC164 had I'm
> more willing to believe that the PC164 is in reality not broken.
> I fact my PC164 masked ints fine several times until it stoped which
> sounds similar to what is being said for the 4100.
> 
> Another point is that there are lots of MBs in tsunami_intr_enable/disable
> especialy the dups are questionable - what's the reason not trusting a
> single one?
> But I can't see where writing to hardware is enshured - are the registers
> marked non-cacheable - but then why an mb?
> I asume 4100 is tsunami based as I can't find any reference in
> alpha/dec_kn300.c for defining of platform.intr_disable/enable.

Good question.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/


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