Improving lost and spurious IRQ handling [LWN.net]

Improving lost and spurious IRQ handling

Posted Jun 18, 2010 6:46 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)
In reply to: Improving lost and spurious IRQ handling by tialaramex
Parent article: Improving lost and spurious IRQ handling

Proactive alerts would be bad, unless a massive failure is imminent, then go ahead and alert me. So, spurious interrupts? Don't tell me proactively. Hard-drive about to croak? Give me a pie in the face if you have to!

That said, it would be nice to have a "Why is it slow?" button that can go round up all the suspicious things it's seen lately, such as:

Spurious interrupts
Dropped interrupts
Kernel oopses that didn't panic the system
HD command timeouts. (Much more common for me back in the IDE days.)
Wacky numbers on my network interfaces (ie. gobs of dropped/collided/whatever packets)
Unusual temperature readings
...etc, etc, etc.

Basically, round up anything vaguely suspicious and say "Uh, here," and maybe stop there. That is, aim it at a semi-expert or motivated tinkerer diagnosing a slow computer. Trying to give advice to less clued users based on some sort of expert system database is asking for trouble and confusion. Better to leave it somewhat opaque and leave it to the educated and motivated to interpret it.

A recent example from my Windows laptop: Video acceleration "dies" if I have VPN up and running while also running dual head. (At least, that's the only common factor I've identified.) I first noticed it because everything "got slow" to varying degrees. If I had a "Why's it slow?" button, it should put that event at the top of the list, even if it can't tell me what to do about it. On a previous laptop, it "got slow" due to HD timeouts. The list goes on. These spurious and dropped interrupts are natural candidates for such a list.

(Log in to post comments)