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Last edited by Philippe Gerum
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Dealing_With_X86_IRQ_Sharing

What if Xenomai and Linux devices share the same IRQ?

IRQ sharing between RT (Xenomai kernel) and non-RT (Linux) domains is fragile regardless of the CPU architecture, can easily destroy determinism on the RT side, and should therefore be avoided whenever possible.

Sharing IRQs between RT devices is not problematic, but still comes with additional overhead compared to dedicated IRQ lines.

On x86, the following approaches exist to untangle devices IRQ-wise:

  • If your hardware implements the Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI), enabling CONFIG_MSI in the kernel should fix the issue.

  • If at least one of the devices is a PCI card, try flipping its position on the motherboard.

  • PC104+ cards sometimes have jumpers (yeah, they still exist) to change the IRQ line. Otherwise, their ordering in the PC104 stack also influences the IRQ line

  • Some (but not many) PC and notebook BIOSes allow to change the IRQ assignment.

  • Disable the conflicting Linux device (e.g. in the BIOS) or simply don’t load its driver.

  • Disable some other on-board device that is unneeded. Sometimes this helps to persuade the system to avoid shared IRQs.

  • Enable CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC or CONFIG_X86_IO_APIC, it increases the number of IRQs and may help (though nobody ever reported success with this).

  • Ask you board vendor about possibilities to untangle IRQ lines — or beat some engineer of your hardware design team if it is a homegrown problem.

  • In case nothing works, and for a given configuration, you may modify the non real-time driver which shares an IRQ with a real-time driver as indicated in this post.