improvement wishes

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 14 October 2009 4:54:44 am Alexander Motin wrote:
> Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> > To all those people with wishes which improve parts of FreeBSD. We have
> > something where you can express your wishes much much better (an on
> > topic) than here in this thread (where jhb is talking about something
> > orthogonal). This other place I talk about is
> > http://www.FreeBSD.org/projects/ideas/ or http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/. Both
> > places are open for modification to everyone. Expressing your wishes
> > there allows a fairy or genie to have a look at them.
> 
> The most efficient place to hunt right genie is near lamp where he
> lives. ;) Ideas page is cool for large projects, but This I hope should
> be easier to fix then publish somewhere for next few years.
> 
> This topic is not completely orthogonal, as adding more information to
> the interrupt consumer name may result (hypothetically) that we won't
> see even second consumer of shared IRQ, instead of third.

The reason why I am not worried about descriptions making the current 
situation worse is that descriptions are intended to be used for devices that 
have multiple interrupts.  For devices with a single interrupt, the device 
name alone is a sufficiently unique label for the interrupt handler, but for 
devices with multiple interrupts having 3 "igb0" interrupts (for example) can 
be very ambiguous.  Like so:

irq256: igb0                      641924          0
irq257: igb0                    21245021         12
irq258: igb0                           3          0
irq259: igb1                     1160790          0
irq260: igb1                     7595639          4
irq261: igb1                           2          0

It would be handy to not have to refer to the source code of the driver to
see what order it assigns interrupt handlers to figure out what is different
about IRQs 256 vs 257 vs 258 for igb0.

The only way devices can currently have multiple devices per interrupt is by 
using PCI MSI/MSI-X interrupts, and the current implementations of MSI ensure 
that MSI interrupts are never shared, so in practice you will not run into 
problems with descriptions causing loss of detail in existing interrupt 
stats.

-- 
John Baldwin