# Interrupt Handling in RISC-V This is a non-authoritative document for informally capturing the requirements for interrupt handling across the spectrum of the entire RISC-V ecosystem, with a view to finding common ground. Following on from that will be seeing where collaboration is (and is not) feasible, and, crucially, if the existing structures (such as the various PLIC implementations that already exist) cover peoples' needs (or not). # Requirements Discussion This section is intended for capturing requirements from different sources so that they can be viewed and compared in one place. If you are not familiar with markdown or editing of wikis please contact luke.leighton@gmail.com, sending the appropriate text, for inclusion here. * **Libre-RISCV Shakti M-Class**: a 300-400 pin SoC with almost a hundred separate and distinct "slow" (below 160mhz) peripherals that need nothing particularly special in the way of fast latency IRQs, just lots of them. Five UARTs, each requiring one IRQ line; Four I2C peripherals, each requiring two IRQ lines, Multiple Quad SPI interfaces requring **six** IRQ lines (each!), and 32 "EINT" lines (general-purpose external interrupt) which are intended for mundane purposes such as "lid opened", or "volume key pressed" and "headphone jack inserted", the number of IRQ lines required to cover such a significant number of peripherals begins to add up quite rapidly. However despite this, the PLIC as it stands (privspec-v-1.10 chapter 7) actually covers the requirements quite nicely, as long as it can cope with large numbers *of* IRQ lines (which it can). Thus the Shakti PLIC Peripheral code has been modified from its original (which could handle up to XLEN separate lines) to a hierarchical arrangement that can handle up to 1024 separate and distinct IRQs . A code-generator tool will take care of the task of auto-generating the #defines for the linux kernel, and presently already takes care of the task of generating the PLIC fabric interconnect.