Core kernel plumbing that lets PCI and PCIe devices deliver Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI and MSI-X) instead of using legacy shared interrupt lines. Virtually every modern PCIe device — network cards, NVMe SSDs, GPUs, storage controllers — relies on this code to route their interrupts to CPUs.
This is not a hardware driver; it is shared infrastructure inside the PCI subsystem that allocates and configures MSI/MSI-X interrupts on behalf of every PCIe device driver in the tree. Removing or deprecating it is not meaningful — it is foundational code that the rest of the kernel depends on.
repository signals
7files
2,072source lines
102commits, 5y
+4,159 / −2,088lines added / removed, 5y
25authors, 5y
monthly commits · 2021-04-21 → 2026-04-21 · 102 total · active in 23/61 months
sources
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codex reasoning notes (technical)
Not a driver directory: contains PCI MSI/MSI-X interrupt-management core code for other drivers, not a hardware device driver for a specific chipset or device family.