:Matthew Dillon wrote:
:> Only newer cpus have APICs and IOAPICs regardless of whether they
:> are SMP-capable or not. Older ones do not.
:
:Afaik, at least any CPU since the Pentium has a LAPIC; and perhaps some
:late 486 models as well; as for IOAPICs, that's a feature of mainboard
:chipsets.
:
:Cheers,
:--
: Thomas E. Spanjaard
: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you can't route interrupts to the LAPIC, its nothing more then a
glorified counter. In order to use the LAPIC for interrupt handling
either the IOAPIC has to be routed to the LAPIC, or the PIC has to be
routed to the LAPIC, or both. If the BIOS doesn't do that magic,
the LAPIC is basically unusable.
On AMD systems the PIC EXTINT/NMI is usually routed over the
hypertransport bus, and the BIOS programs hardware registers in the
protected PCI configuration space (0xcf8-0xcff) to route that
EXTINT/NMI to the LAPIC. The BIOS does not usually do this on UP
systems, or it only does it with certain ACPI magic (I'm not really
sure, the APIs are pretty aweful).
At least on AMD systems it is usually possible to route the PIC to
the LAPIC if the BIOS doesn't, due to the hypertransport standard.
I have no clue how to do it on Intel systems.
If you can't route the PIC to the LAPIC then the PICs interrupt goes
directly into the cpu's EXTINT/NMI circuitry, meaning that you have
to handle the interrupt via the cpu's base interrupt vectors instead
of via the LAPICs interrupt vectors.
-Matt
