
82374EB/82374SB
The ESC’s I/O APIC Unit consists of a set of interrupt input signals, a 16-entry Interrupt Redirection Table,
programmable registers, and a message unit for sending and receiving APIC messages over the APIC bus
(Figure 24). I/O devices inject interrupts into the system by asserting one of the interrupt lines to the I/O APIC
(Figure 25). The I/O APIC selects the corresponding entry in the Redirection Table and uses the information in
that entry to format an interrupt request message. Each entry in the Redirection Table can be individually
programmed to indicate edge/level sensitive interrupt signals, the interrupt vector and priority, the destination
processor, and how the processor is selected (statically or dynamically). The information in the table is used to
transmit a message to other APIC units (via the APIC bus).
The ESC’s I/O APIC contains a set of programmable registers. Two of the registers (I/O Register Select and
I/O Window Registers) are located in the CPU’s memory space and are used to indirectly access the other
APIC registers as described in Section 3.0, Register Description. The Version Register provides the implemen-
tation version of the I/O APIC. The I/O APIC ID Register is programmed with an ID value that serves as a
physical name of the I/O APIC. This ID is loaded into the ARB ID Register when the I/O APIC ID Register is
written and is used during bus arbitration.
NOTE:
1. When the ESC’s I/O APIC receives an interrupt request, the ESC instructs the PCEB to flush its
buffers and to request all system buffers pointing to PCI to be flushed (via the AFLUSH
Y
signal). The
APIC does not send the interrupt message over the APIC bus until the ESC receives confirmation
from the PCEB (via the AFLUSH
Y
signal) that all buffers have been flushed and temporarily disabled.
2. The interrupt number or the vector does not imply a particular priority for being sent. The I/O APIC
continually polls the 16 interrupts in a rotating fashion, one at a time. The pending interrupt polled first
is the one sent.
290476–D7
Figure 24. APIC Register Block Diagram
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