RISC-V Hart-Level Interrupt Controller (HLIC)

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RISC-V cores include Control Status Registers (CSRs) which are local to each

CPU core (HART in RISC-V terminology) and can be read or written by software.

Some of these CSRs are used to control local interrupts connected to the core.

Every interrupt is ultimately routed through a hart's HLIC before it

interrupts that hart.

The RISC-V supervisor ISA manual specifies three interrupt sources that are

attached to every HLIC: software interrupts, the timer interrupt, and external

interrupts. Software interrupts are used to send IPIs between cores. The

timer interrupt comes from an architecturally mandated real-time timer that is

controller via Supervisor Binary Interface (SBI) calls and CSR reads. External

interrupts connect all other device interrupts to the HLIC, which are routed

via the platform-level interrupt controller (PLIC).

All RISC-V systems that conform to the supervisor ISA specification are

required to have a HLIC with these three interrupt sources present. Since the

interrupt map is defined by the ISA it's not listed in the HLIC's device tree

entry, though external interrupt controllers (like the PLIC, for example) will

need to define how their interrupts map to the relevant HLICs. This means

a PLIC interrupt property will typically list the HLICs for all present HARTs

in the system.

Required properties:

- compatible : "riscv,cpu-intc"

- #interrupt-cells : should be <1>

- interrupt-controller : Identifies the node as an interrupt controller

Furthermore, this interrupt-controller MUST be embedded inside the cpu

definition of the hart whose CSRs control these local interrupts.

An example device tree entry for a HLIC is show below.

cpu1: cpu@1 {

compatible = "riscv";

...

cpu1-intc: interrupt-controller {

#interrupt-cells = <1>;

compatible = "riscv,cpu-intc", "sifive,fu540-c000-cpu-intc";

interrupt-controller;

};

};