Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: MSI to memory? | From | Roland Dreier <> | Date | Fri, 02 Jul 2004 09:04:12 -0700 |
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Bjorn> The conventional use of MSI is for a PCI adapter to Bjorn> generate processor interrupts by writing to a local APIC. Bjorn> But I've seen some things that lead me to believe it would Bjorn> also allow an adapter to write to things other than a local Bjorn> APIC, i.e., to memory.
Bjorn> If so, is that a useful capability that should be exposed Bjorn> through the Linux MSI interface?
MSI does allow an adapter to write messages to any arbitrary PCI address (under the control of the host software). It's not clear to me that write to anywhere other than a special interrupt generation address is that useful.
It is true that the current Linux MSI code is quite Intel-specific, hard-coding Intel addresses and message contents. At some point, if I'm able to get documentation on interesting hardware, I would like to try and move the generation of addresses/messages to arch-specific code so that Linux can support more general PCI hosts.
Unfortunately, it seems that at least the current HyperTransport PCI-X tunnels used on Opteron systems do not support MSI (based on my quick reading of the documentation). The only hardware I have access to that supports MSI is the PowerPC 440GP, and I'm not sure how interesting that is.
I assume that future PCI Express chipsets for Opteron will support MSI, and hopefully documentation will be available (or manufacturers will write Linux support).
Does anyone know if there are any ppc64 systems that support MSI?
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