[PATCH] "big IRQ lock" removal, IRQ cleanups
This is a massive cleanup of the IRQ subsystem. It's losely based on Linus' original idea and DaveM's original implementation, to fold our various irq, softirq and bh counters into the preemption counter. with this approach it was possible: - to remove the 'big IRQ lock' on SMP - on which sti() and cli() relied. - to streamline/simplify arch/i386/kernel/irq.c significantly. - to simplify the softirq code. - to remove the preemption count increase/decrease code from the lowlevel IRQ assembly code. - to speed up schedule() a bit. Global sti() and cli() is gone forever on SMP, there is no more globally synchronizing irq-disabling capability. All code that relied on sti() and cli() and restore_flags() must use other locking mechanisms from now on (spinlocks and __cli()/__sti()). obviously this patch breaks massive amounts of code, so only limited .configs are working at the moment (UP is expected to be unaffected, but SMP will require various driver updates). The patch was developed and tested on SMP systems, and while the code is still a bit rough in places, the base IRQ code appears to be pretty robust and clean. while it boots already so the worst is over, there is lots of work left: eg. to fix the serial layer to not use cli()/sti() and bhs ...
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include/linux/preempt.h
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