BCM2835 Interrupt Controller

The BCM2835 Interrupt Controller is a memory-mapped peripheral available on the BCM2835 System-on-a-Chip used in the Raspberry Pi. It allows software to enable or disable specific IRQs (interrupt requests). Each IRQ usually corresponds to some sort of device available on the chip.

Hardware Details

It is important to understand that on the BCM2835, some IRQs are shared between the ARM CPU and VideoCore GPU. This interrupt controller controls both these shared IRQs as well as a few ARM-specific IRQs, and the layout of the registers reflects this separation. Some of the shared IRQs are already enabled by the GPU and therefore should not be enabled. However, this interrupt controller is only used by the ARM to control which interrupts actually get routed to the ARM; the GPU most likely has its own interrupt controller.

The BCM2835 Interrupt Controller is a memory-mapped peripheral available at physical memory address 0x2000B000. The following table describes the registers, each of which is 32 bits. Note that the offsets start at 0x200, not 0. We do this for consistency with Broadcom's documentation. To be completely clear, IRQ_basic_pending is located at physical memory address 0x2000B200.

BCM2835 Interrupt Controller registers

Offset	Name	Description
0x200	IRQ_basic_pending	Bitmask of pending ARM-specific IRQs, as well as additional bits (not currently used by Embedded Xinu) to accelerate interrupt handling.
0x204	IRQ_pending_1	Bitmask of pending shared IRQs 0-31
0x208	IRQ_pending_2	Bitmask of pending shared IRQs 32-63
0x20C	FIQ_control	TODO
0x210	Enable_IRQs_1	Write 1 to the corresponding bit(s) to enable one or more shared IRQs in the range 0-31
0x214	Enable_IRQs_2	Write 1 to the corresponding bit(s) to enable one or more shared IRQs in the range 32-63
0x218	Enable_Basic_IRQs	Write 1 to the corresponding bit(s) to enable one or more ARM-specific IRQs
0x21C	Disable_IRQs_1	Write 1 to the corresponding bit(s) to disable one or more shared IRQs in the range 0-31
0x220	Disable_IRQs_2	Write 1 to the corresponding bit(s) to disable one or more shared IRQs in the range 32-63
0x224	Disable_Basic_IRQs	Write 1 to the corresponding bit(s) to disable one or more ARM-specific IRQs

For this interrupt controller to actually be of any use, the mapping of IRQs to devices must be known. The following table is an incomplete list that documents the IRQs we have tested in our work with Embedded Xinu. The full list can be found declared in a Linux header. Below we use the numbering scheme used by both Embedded Xinu and Linux, where the shared IRQs are numbered 0-63, and ARM-specific IRQs are numbered starting at 64.

Incomplete list of BCM2835 IRQs.

IRQ	Device	Notes
0	System Timer Compare Register 0	Do not enable this IRQ; it's already used by the GPU.
1	System Timer Compare Register 1	See BCM2835 System Timer.
2	System Timer Compare Register 2	Do not enable this IRQ; it's already used by the GPU.
3	System Timer Compare Register 3	See BCM2835 System Timer.
9	USB Controller	This is the only USB IRQ because all communication with USB devices happens through the USB Controller. See Synopsys DesignWare High-Speed USB 2.0 On-The-Go Controller.
55	PCM Audio
57	PL011 UART	See PL011 UART.
62	SD Host Controller

Notes:

• Software cannot "clear" interrupts using the interrupt controller. Instead, interrupts must be cleared in a device-specific way.
• Although some shared interrupts appear in the IRQ_Basic_Pending register as well as in the IRQ_Pending_1 or IRQ_Pending_2 registers, they cannot be enabled or disabled in Enable_Basic_IRQs or Disable_Basic_IRQs.

Use in Embedded Xinu

Embedded Xinu (that, is XinuPi) uses the BCM2835 Interrupt Controller to implement enable_irq() and disable_irq(). The code is in system/platforms/arm-rpi/dispatch.c. These functions simply are passed the number of the IRQ to enable or disable. Shared IRQs are numbered 0-63, while ARM-specific IRQs (currently not actually used) are numbered starting at 64. Also in this file you will find dispatch(), which is called from the assembly language IRQ handler in system/arch/arm/irq_handler.S to handle an interrupt. The point of dispatch() is to figure out which number IRQs are actually pending, then call the registered interrupt handler for each.

External Links

• BCM2835 ARM Peripherals datasheet by Broadcom. The interrupt controller is documented in Section 7 (p. 109-118). Compared to some of the Raspberry Pi hardware, this is one of the better documented components. Beware, though, that Broadcom's docs don't mention some of the important IRQ numbers, such as 0-3 (System Timer) and 9 (USB Controller).