The realtime preemption mini-summit

Oct 09, 2009, 01:32 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jonathan Corbet)

"There is one part of the threaded interrupt code which remains outside of the mainline: the piece which forces all drivers to use threaded handlers. There are no plans to move that code into the mainline; instead, it's going to be a matter of persuasion to get driver writers to switch to the newer way of doing things.

"Uptake in the mainline is small so far; few drivers are actually using this feature. That is beginning to change, though; the SCSI layer is one example. SCSI has always featured relatively heavyweight interrupt-handling code and work done in single-threaded workqueues. This code could move fairly naturally to process context; the SCSI developers are said to be evaluating a possible move toward threaded interrupt handlers in the near future. There have also been suggestions that the network stack might eventually move in that direction."

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