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Date:      Fri, 05 Sep 2014 17:11:56 -0600
From:      Ian Lepore <ian@FreeBSD.org>
To:        ticso@cicely.de
Cc:        freebsd-arm@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Cubieboard: Spurious interrupt detected
Message-ID:  <1409958716.1150.321.camel@revolution.hippie.lan>
In-Reply-To: <20140905215702.GL3196@cicely7.cicely.de>
References:  <2279481.3MX4OEDuCl@quad> <20140905215702.GL3196@cicely7.cicely.de>

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On Fri, 2014-09-05 at 23:57 +0200, Bernd Walter wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 06, 2014 at 01:43:23AM +0400, Maxim V FIlimonov wrote:
> > And another problem: every now and then the kernel says something like that:
> > Sep  5 19:22:37  kernel: Spurious interrupt detected
> > Sep  5 19:22:37  kernel: Spurious interrupt detected
> > Sep  5 19:23:46  last message repeated 10 times
> > 
> > I've heard that FreeBSD happens to do that on ARM devices. What could be the 
> > problem here?
> 
> Means something generates inetrrupts, which are not handled by a driver.
> Could be the cause for your load problem too.
> 

No, that would be stray interrupts.  Spurious interrupts happen when an
interrupt is asserted, but by time the processor asks the interrupt
controller for the current active interrupt, it is no longer active. 

One way it can happen is when an interrupt handler writes to a device to
clear a pending interrupt and that write takes a long time to complete
because the device is on a slow bus, and the interrupt controller is on
a faster bus.  The EOI to the controller outraces the device write that
would clear the pending interrupt condition, so the processor is
re-interrupted, but by time it asks for the next active interrupt the
device write has finally completed and the interrupt is no longer
pending.

That sequence used to happen a lot, and it was "fixed" by adding an
l2cache sync (basically a "drain write buffer") just before an EOI.  You
sometimes still see an occasional spurious interrupt, but it shouldn't
be happening multiple times per second as seen in the logging above.

-- Ian





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