IRQ management

Russell Coker - mailing lists account (bofh@snoopy.virtual.net.au)
Sat, 07 Jun 97 03:05:06 +1100


I've recently been doing some work on the configuration of Stallion
drivers which will hopefully appear in 2.1.43. I have been thinking about
the issue of IRQ configuration, the Stallion boards allow us to configure
the IRQ at driver load time (and could probably be hacked to change it
while the driver is running).

What I would like to do is to determine an appropriate IRQ when the
driver is loaded if the user doesn't specify which IRQ to use. Is there
any code in the kernel to manage IRQs which I could use for this?

Another thing I have been thinking of is the ability for a driver to
register "I have IRQ X, but can also use Y or Z" which would mean that if
another driver was loaded which absolutely required IRQ X, then the driver
could be asked to change to one of them and give up IRQ X.

What do you think of this idea?

Russell Coker

PS Is there some problem with this list? I sent my Stallion patch in
twice and it never appeared, while my DLCI patch which I posted 5 minutes
before the Stallion patch came through...