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Raven PCI Bridge ASIC

Nesting of Interrupt Events

A processor is guaranteed never to have an in-service interrupt preempted by an equal- or lower-priority source. An interrupt is considered to be in service from the time its vector is returned during an interrupt acknowledge cycle until an EOI is received for that interrupt. The EOI cycle indicates the end of processing for the highest-priority in-service interrupt.

Spurious Vector Generation

Under certain circumstances the RavenMPIC will not have a valid vector to return to the processor during an interrupt acknowledge cycle. In these cases, the spurious vector from the spurious vector register will be returned. The following cases would cause a spurious vector fetch.

INT is asserted in response to an externally sourced interrupt which is activated with level sensitive logic and the asserted level is negated before the interrupt is acknowledged.

INT is asserted for an interrupt source which is masked using the mask bit in the Vector-Priority register before the interrupt is acknowledged.

Interprocessor Interrupts (IPI)

Processors 0 and 1 can generate interrupts which are targeted for the other processor or both processors. There are four Interprocessor Interrupt (IPI) channels. The interrupts are initiated by writing a bit in the IPI dispatch registers. If subsequent IPIs are initiated before the first is acknowledged, only one IPI will be generated. The IPI channels deliver interrupts in Direct mode and can be directed to more than one processor.

8259 Compatibility

The RavenMPIC provides a mechanism to support PC-AT compatible chip sets using the 8259 interrupt controller architecture. After power-on reset, the RavenMPIC defaults to 8259 pass-through mode. In this mode, interrupts from external source number 0 (the interrupt signal from the 8259 is connected to this external interrupt source on the RavenMPIC) are

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Motorola MVME2300 Series manual Nesting of Interrupt Events, Spurious Vector Generation, Interprocessor Interrupts IPI