Re: [PATCH] Prevent nested interrupts when the IRQ stack is near overflowing v2

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2010, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> FWIW lockdep forces IRQF_DISABLED and yells when anybody does
> local_irq_enable() while in hardirq context, I haven't seen any such
> splats in a long while, except from the ARM people who did funny things
> with building their own threaded interrupts or somesuch.

The thing is, that won't show the drivers that just simply _expect_ 
other interrupts to happen.

The SCSI situation, iirc, used to be that certain error conditions simply 
caused a delay loop (reset? I forget) that depended on 'jiffies'. So there 
was no 'local_irq_enable()' involved, nor did it even happen under any 
normal load - only in error situations.

Now, I think (and sincerely) that the SCSI situation is likely long since 
fixed, but we have thousands and thousands of drivers, and these kinds of 
things are very hard to notice automatically. Are there any cases around 
that still have busy-loop delays based on real-time in their irq handlers? 
I simply don't know.

			Linus