On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 12:07 AM, Matthew Fortune <matthew.fort...@imgtec.com> wrote: > H.J. Lu <hjl.to...@gmail.com> writes: >> On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Matthew Fortune >> <matthew.fort...@imgtec.com> wrote: >> > H.J. Lu <hjl.to...@gmail.com> writes: >> >> On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 10:37 AM, H.J. Lu <hjl.to...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> > The interrupt and exception handlers are called by x86 processors. X86 >> >> > hardware puts information on stack and calls the handler. The >> >> > requirements are >> >> > >> >> > 1. Both interrupt and exception handlers must use the 'IRET' >> >> > instruction, >> >> > instead of the 'RET' instruction, to return from the handlers. >> >> > 2. All registers are callee-saved in interrupt and exception handlers. >> >> > 3. The difference between interrupt and exception handlers is the >> >> > exception handler must pop 'ERROR_CODE' off the stack before the 'IRET' >> >> > instruction. >> >> > >> >> > The design goals of interrupt and exception handlers for x86 processors >> >> > are: >> >> > >> >> > 1. No new calling convention in compiler. >> >> > 2. Support both 32-bit and 64-bit modes. >> >> > 3. Flexible for compilers to optimize. >> >> > 4. Easy to use by programmers. >> >> > >> >> > To implement interrupt and exception handlers for x86 processors, a >> >> > compiler should support: >> >> > >> >> > 1. void * __builtin_ia32_interrupt_data (void) >> >> >> >> I got a feedback on the name of this builtin function. Since >> >> it also works for 64-bit, we should avoid ia32 in its name. >> >> We'd like to change it to >> >> >> >> void * __builtin_interrupt_data (void) >> >> >> >> Any comments? >> > >> > For what it's worth, this seems like a good plan to me. I don't know x86 >> > but how many variations of interrupt and exception handling mechanisms >> > are there? If there are lots then you may want to make it clear which >> > subset of them you intend to support. I just added a few more variations >> > of interrupt handlers to MIPS and it got complicated quite quickly. >> > >> > I think I remember someone asking about interrupt handler support for >> > x86 some time ago and the answer then was that there were too many >> > variants to make it useful. >> >> In my proposal, there are only 2 handlers: interrupt and exception. >> __builtin_interrupt_data is provided to programmers to implement >> different variants of those handlers. > > Yes, I realised that but was just curious how many hardware interrupt > handling schemes there are for x86. I.e. How the handlers are glued into > an interrupt vector/how they get routed. Is there a generic piece of > code that could at least hook up/install an exception handler on most > x86 variants? >
We only support writing interrupt handler in C. Hookup/install an interrupt handler is up to the programmer. -- H.J.