How to mask IRQ

[Sergei Organov]

leonp at plris.com writes:

> On Monday, 30 в▒May 2005 08:54, Thomas Doerfler wrote:
> > Hello Leon,
> >
> > you are right, the general SIU interrupt dispatcher will restore the SIU
> > mask register after the IRQ function returns. This is a general problem
> > with the MPC8xx Interrupt Controller, you will find this behaviour in
> > various operating systems. The SIU Mask Register actually belongs to the
> > interrupt dispatcher and not to the specific interrupt handlers.
> >
> > Maybe it would be possible to introduce another "handler mask" variable,
> > which would be applied to the mask value written to the SIU mask
> > register in the dispatcher code? So the mask value would consist of the
> > "standard" value given in the standard table (I think) plus the value in
> > the mask variable (whatever operation is needed to "add" these two
> > masks). And there could be a well-defined API extension to set/clear
> > bits in this additional variable.
> Thanks, Thomas - this is exactly what I was thinking about.
> I just was worried about the possible problems connected to the nested 
> interrupts.
> As it is very difficult to test such a coincidences, I wanted to discuss the 
> idea itself and possible implementations on the list.

It could be an alternative solution to throw away the idea of automatic
management of nested interrupts and their priorities altogether. Instead
of emulating priority IC in software, let the threads scheduler handle
priorities by delegating most of the work from IRQ handlers level to the
task level. This way you will have simple and fast IRQ dispatcher that
won't touch IRQ masks at all allowing you to manage them whatever way
you wish.

-- 
Sergei.