Kernel-space interface to 8259 and 8259A Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC)

Work in progress: I am not qualified to have written this crate. This has been verified to work in simple cases in QEMU. It may break on real hardware (especially buggy hardware) or in more complicated scenarios. Your bug reports and PRs are extremely welcome. Things we may not handle very well yet include:

1. Masking interrupts.
2. Dealing with spurious interrupts.
3. Non-standard configurations.

This code is based on the OSDev Wiki PIC notes, but it's not a complete implementation of everything they discuss. Also note that if you want to do more sophisticated interrupt handling, especially on multiprocessor systems, you'll probably want to read about the newer APIC and IOAPIC interfaces.

Using

This is a very basic interface to the 8259 and 8259A interrupt controllers, which are used on single processor systems to pass hardware interrupts to the CPU.

To use this crate, add it to your Cargo.toml file, along with an appropriate kernel-space mutex implementation such as spin:

[dependencies]
pic8259_simple = "*"
spin = "*"

You can then declare a global, lockable ChainedPics object as follows:

extern crate pic8259_simple;
extern crate spin;

use pic8259_simple::ChainedPics;
use spin::Mutex;

// Map PIC interrupts to 0x20 through 0x2f.
static PICS: Mutex<ChainedPics> =
    Mutex::new(unsafe { ChainedPics::new(0x20, 0x28) });

To perform runtime PIC intialization, call initialize before enabling interrupts:

PICS.lock().initialize();

When you've finished handling an interrupt, run:

PICS.lock().notify_end_of_interrupt(interrupt_id);

It's safe to call notify_end_of_interrupt after every interrupt; the notify_end_of_interrupt function will try to figure out what it needs to do.

All public PIC interfaces are unsafe, because it's really easy to trigger undefined behavior by misconfiguring the PIC or using it incorrectly.

Licensing

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT license, at your option.