Hi Jason,

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 10:01:44AM -0800, Jason Thorpe wrote:

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> The way I see it, interrupt threads are an attempt at solving the  
> synchronization problem from the wrong direction.  Instead, I think  
> the right approach is to fully split every driver into a "top  
> half" (runs with thread context, possibly as a high-priority kernel  
> thread) and "bottom half" (runs in interrupt context).
> 
> Furthermore, I believe that the bottom half should manipulate state  
> that is local only to the instance of the driver associated with the  
> device that is interrupting (and have that state be spin-mutex  
> protected).
>
> This approach would have a few advantages:
> 
> 1- Simplicity.  Interrupt dispatch would be largely as it is today.

Interrupt dispatch will be simpler yes. Device drivers would become more
complicated, and they are more numerous.

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> 2- Speed.  Because the low-level interrupt dispatch code could be  
> simple and avoid magic, it could be very fast, which would help  
> devices that are particularly sensitive to interrupt latency.

If you have a device that's particularly sensitive to interrupt latency,
then the two level model is a good one, I agree completely. There is
nothing to prevent that model from being used where it's a good fit.

For the general case, I don't agree though. On recent processors with long
instruction pipelines, serializing control operations are really expensive.
x86 chips from 5 years ago are faster in this regard than the current Intel
offerings - in real time, not clock cycles. I'm keen to avoid that kind of
"funneling" of work unless it's really neccessary - meaning, it's existence
actually has a justifiable benefit, So I have been trying to eliminate these
kinds of operations where they are unnecessary, e.g: during lock release,
during splx(), during syscalls, in the locking scheme devised for the
scheduler and so on.

What I want to do will on x86 add 29 arithmetic instructions to the
interrupt path (as of now). That's means in the common, non blocking case,
it's ~free. I'd be pretty bummed if we undo some of that and the reasoning
for doing so is to make the system a better fit for ~20 year old systems.

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> 3- Portability.  Because the low-level interrupt dispatch would work  
> basically like it does today, we know it will work on all of our  
> extant platforms.

Yup, modifing the interrupt handling is tricky..

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> I think there are some particularly nasty "gotchas" with
> interrupt-dispatch-as-continuation-or-thread that can be hard to fix on
> platforms like VAX (especially) or even SPARC and m68k.

Vax and m68k we can deal with. The interrupt LWP scheme probably doesn't
suit them particularly well, but it is a good match for current offerings.
 
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> 4- Consistency.  We already have this sort of model "sort of" today;  
> consider serial drivers that have hard-interrupt handlers that run at  
> extremely high priority to read data into a local ring buffer and then  
> schedule a soft interrupt to do the TTY processing.  What I'm looking  
> for here is to formalize this for EVERY kind of device.  This will  
> make it easier to write drivers for NetBSD.  We could even provide  
> some API to help people write drivers that conform to the model.

Mmm.. No sale on the consistency ticket, sorry. :-)

Cheers,
Andrew