docs/plan/hybrid.md mechanism 3. A process asks for a device's interrupts with
PCIIOC_IRQ and then reads them, which is how Linux's uio does it and for the
same reason: a descriptor composes with poll, and a driver that stops reading
falls behind rather than losing events. read() returns a count rather than a
flag, so a driver that was busy sees it missed three and acts once.
Proven against an e1000e by asserting a cause through its ICS register and
reading the interrupt back out in userspace:
interrupts routed here (line 10)
interrupt delivered, count = 1
ICR = 0x80000004
0x80000004 is the cause the test set plus INT_ASSERTED -- the device's own
register, read by userspace as its acknowledgement.
**The masking is the design, not a detail.** A PCI line is level-triggered and
stays asserted until the cause is cleared at the device, which is a different
register on every chip and so is something only the driver can do. The kernel
masks the line on arrival and userspace's write() unmasks it. Signalling EOI on
a still-asserted line re-enters the handler immediately and for ever; this
kernel did exactly that by accident at 72,000 interrupts a second, and what it
looked like from outside was a clock running seven times slow (§13).
Which decides what happens when a driver dies mid-interrupt: the line is left
**masked**. The instinct is to unmask -- do not leave the device dead -- and it
is wrong, because unmasking an asserted line with no handler is a crashed
driver taking the machine down with it. Masked is safe and not permanent: the
next PCIIOC_IRQ arms it. Both halves verified by crashing a driver on purpose
and then starting another one.
A line already carrying kernel handlers is refused outright. Masking is
per-line, so handing out a shared one would silence whichever kernel driver is
also there, with nothing logged. MSI is the real answer and pci_msi_enable() is
already in the tree waiting for a caller.
Also fixed, found by running the crash twice: DMA buffers were never returned
when a process exited. The arena is 4 MB and contiguous, so a driver that
restarts a few times exhausted it -- "out of DMA memory, 3584 free" -- which is
a poor property for an interface whose whole promise is that a driver can crash
and come back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
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