[cfe-dev] RFC: Support x86 interrupt and exception handlers

[H.J. Lu via cfe-dev]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 12:07 AM, Matthew Fortune
<Matthew.Fortune at imgtec.com> wrote:
> H.J. Lu <hjl.tools at gmail.com> writes:
>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Matthew Fortune
>> <Matthew.Fortune at imgtec.com> wrote:
>> > H.J. Lu <hjl.tools at gmail.com> writes:
>> >> On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 10:37 AM, H.J. Lu <hjl.tools at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> > The interrupt and exception handlers are called by x86 processors.  X86
>> >> > hardware puts information on stack and calls the handler.  The
>> >> > requirements are
>> >> >
>> >> > 1. Both interrupt and exception handlers must use the 'IRET' instruction,
>> >> > instead of the 'RET' instruction, to return from the handlers.
>> >> > 2. All registers are callee-saved in interrupt and exception handlers.
>> >> > 3. The difference between interrupt and exception handlers is the
>> >> > exception handler must pop 'ERROR_CODE' off the stack before the 'IRET'
>> >> > instruction.
>> >> >
>> >> > The design goals of interrupt and exception handlers for x86 processors
>> >> > are:
>> >> >
>> >> > 1. No new calling convention in compiler.
>> >> > 2. Support both 32-bit and 64-bit modes.
>> >> > 3. Flexible for compilers to optimize.
>> >> > 4. Easy to use by programmers.
>> >> >
>> >> > To implement interrupt and exception handlers for x86 processors, a
>> >> > compiler should support:
>> >> >
>> >> > 1. void * __builtin_ia32_interrupt_data (void)
>> >>
>> >> I got a feedback on the name of this builtin function.  Since
>> >> it also works for 64-bit,  we should avoid ia32 in its name.
>> >> We'd like to change it to
>> >>
>> >> void * __builtin_interrupt_data (void)
>> >>
>> >> Any comments?
>> >
>> > For what it's worth, this seems like a good plan to me. I don't know x86
>> > but how many variations of interrupt and exception handling mechanisms
>> > are there? If there are lots then you may want to make it clear which
>> > subset of them you intend to support. I just added a few more variations
>> > of interrupt handlers to MIPS and it got complicated quite quickly.
>> >
>> > I think I remember someone asking about interrupt handler support for
>> > x86 some time ago and the answer then was that there were too many
>> > variants to make it useful.
>>
>> In my proposal, there are only 2 handlers: interrupt and exception.
>> __builtin_interrupt_data is provided to programmers to implement
>> different variants of those handlers.
>
> Yes, I realised that but was just curious how many hardware interrupt
> handling schemes there are for x86. I.e. How the handlers are glued into
> an interrupt vector/how they get routed. Is there a generic piece of
> code that could at least hook up/install an exception handler on most
> x86 variants?
>

We only support writing interrupt handler in C.  Hookup/install an
interrupt handler is up to the programmer.

-- 
H.J.