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Date:      Thu, 11 Dec 2014 11:58:21 -0800
From:      Navdeep Parhar <nparhar@gmail.com>
To:        Martin Galvan <omgalvan.86@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-drivers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Locking a MTX_DEF inside an interrupt thread
Message-ID:  <20141211195821.GA3827@ox>
In-Reply-To: <CAN19L9FDgn9=UZ9E%2BhAxSQtFXtT=42zoBD0MvJwYW0_dx61nvw@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CAN19L9FDgn9=UZ9E%2BhAxSQtFXtT=42zoBD0MvJwYW0_dx61nvw@mail.gmail.com>

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MTX_DEF mutexes can block but never sleep, and it is perfectly safe to acquire
them in an ithread.

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 03:38:06AM -0300, Martin Galvan wrote:
> Hi everyone! I was reading the man page on bus_setup_intr() and
> noticed it warned against sleeping inside an ithread routine. However,
> I saw a few drivers that start their ithread routines by locking a
> MTX_DEF mutex, which I understand will make a thread sleep if the
> mutex is already being held by another thread. Based on that, I'd like
> to ask you guys a few questions:
> 
> 1) Why can't we sleep inside an ithread? Isn't being able to
> context-switch (and thus avoiding using spinlocks) the whole point of
> using a separate thread for an interrupt handler?
> 2) What would be the 'correct' way to write an ithread routine which
> uses shared resources (such as a softc)?
> 3) Should we fix the drivers that use MTX_DEF mutexes inside their ithreads?
> 
> Thanks a lot!
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