linux-kernel - Question on The Timer Interrupt Dispatch

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Date:	Wed, 13 Sep 2006 23:26:50 +0800
From:	"Dong Feng" <middle.fengdong@...il.com>
To:	"Andi Kleen" <ak@...e.de>, liqiang@...tel.com,
	"李强" <victor.liqiang@...il.com>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Question on The Timer Interrupt Dispatch

One question confuses me for quiet a while about the initialization of
the IO APIC.

For my understanding, in i386 architecture, the timer interrupts are
dispatched among every CPU in a roughly round-robin fashion
*immediately* (or reasonably short) after the IO APIC has been
initialized and a secondary CPU has enabled its local IRQ. Turning to
code, I suppose the first condition should be met by [init() ->
smp_prepare_cpus() -> smp_boot_cpus() -> smpboot_setup_io_apic() ->
setup_IO_APIC()], and the second condition should be met by [
start_secondary() -> local_irq_enable() ].

I tried to confirm my guess by tracing the initialization code
execution on my Dual-core laptop . However, I get very confusing
result. While both the conditions had just been met as described
above, CPU 0 has handled about 70 ticks (i.e. timer interrupt) and CPU
1 has handled 0 tick. I expected CPU 1 would get its first timer
interrupt after few ticks. But the fact is that CPU 1 has not been
interrupted by timer until CPU 0 has handled over 7000 ticks. Since
CPU 1 gets the first interrupt, the subsequent timer interrupts are
distributed on both CPU roughly equally.

I still can not find any explanation myself for the gap between my
presumption and the result from code tracing. According to the
presumption, CPU 1 should get the first interrupt while CPU 0 handles
70 ticks, but CPU 1 does not until CPU 0 handles over 7000 ticks.
Could you please pointed out which part I missed in my understanding?

Thanks.
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