I am reading Operating System Concepts (Silberschatz,Galvin,Gagne), 6th edition, chapter 20.
I understand that Linux kernel code is non preemptible (before 2.6 version). But it can be interrupted by hardware interrupts. What happens if the kernel was in the middle of a critical section and the interrupt occured and it too executed the critical section?
From what I read in the book:
The second protection scheme that
Linux uses applies to critical
sections that occur in the interrupt service routines. The basic tool is
the processor interrupt control
hardware…
Ok, this scheme is used when an ISR has a critical section. But it will only disble further interrupts. What about the kernel code which was interrupted by this interrupt in the first place?
If the interrupt handler and other kernel code need access to the same data, you need to protect against that, which is usually done by a spinlock , great care must be taken, you don’t want to introduce a deadlock ,and you must ensure such a spinlock is not held for too long. For spinlocks used in a hardware interrupt handler you have to disable interrupts on that processor whilst holding the lock – which in linux is done with the function spin_lock_irqsave().
(whilst a bit outdated, you can read about the concept here)