N Nitesh Narayan Lal #
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The drivers currently rely on irq_set_affinity_hint() to either set the affinity_hint that is consumed by the userspace and/or to enforce a custom affinity. irq_set_affinity_hint() as the name suggests is originally introduced to only set the affinity_hint to help the userspace in guiding the interrupts and not the affinity itself. However, since the commit e2e64a932556 "genirq: Set initial affinity in irq_set_affinity_hint()" irq_set_affinity_hint() also started applying the provided cpumask (if not NULL) as the affinity for the interrupts. The issue that this commit was trying to solve is to allow the drivers to enforce their affinity mask to distribute the interrupts across the CPUs such that they don't always end up on CPU0. This issue has been resolved within the irq subsystem since the commit a0c9259dc4e1 "irq/matrix: Spread interrupts on allocation" Hence, there is no need for the drivers to overwrite the affinity to spread as it is dynamically performed at the time of allocation. Also, irq_set_affinity_hint() setting affinity unconditionally introduces issues for the drivers that only want to set their affinity_hint and not the affinity itself as for these driver interrupts the default_smp_affinity_mask is completely ignored (for detailed investigation please refer to [1]). Unfortunately reverting the commit e2e64a932556 is not an option at this point for two reasons [2]: - Several drivers for a valid reason (performance) rely on this API to enforce their affinity mask - Until very recently this was the only exported interface that was available To clear this out Thomas has come up with the following interfaces: - irq_set_affinity(): only sets affinity of an IRQ [3] - irq_update_affinity_hint(): Only sets the hint [4]