I suggest to change the way IRQs are handed out to PCI devices.
Currently, each I/O APIC pin gets associated with an IRQ, no matter if the
pin is used or not. It is expected that each pin can potentually be
engaged by a device inserted into the corresponding PCI slot. However,
this imposes severe limitation on systems that have designs that employ
many I/O APICs, only utilizing couple lines of each, such as P64H2 chipset.
It is used in ES7000, and currently, there is no way to boot the system
with more that 9 I/O APICs.
The simple change below allows to boot a system with say 64 (or more) I/O
APICs, each providing 1 slot, which otherwise impossible because of the IRQ
gaps created for unused lines on each I/O APIC. It does not resolve the
problem with number of devices that exceeds number of possible IRQs, but
eases up a tension for IRQs on any large system with potentually large
number of devices.
I only implemented this for the ACPI boot, since if the system is this big
and using newer chipsets it is probably (better be!) an ACPI based system
:). The change is completely "mechanical" and does not alter any internal
structures or interrupt model/implementation. The patch works for both
i386 and x86_64 archs. It works with MSIs just fine, and should not
intervene with implementations like shared vectors, when they get worked
out and incorporated.
To illustrate, below is the interrupt distribution for 2-cell ES7000 with
20 I/O APICs, and an Ethernet card in the last slot, which should be eth1
and which was not configured because its IRQ exceeded allowable number (it
actially turned out huge - 480!):
projects / linux-2.6-omap-h63xx.git / commit