doubt about interrupts and spinlocks

[Oscar Salvador]

Hi!

I have a doubt about interrupts and spin locks.
I'm not sure if I'm in the good way:

When an interrupt is raised, the kernel (through do_IRQ and etc)
acknowledges the interrupt and locks this IRQ taking a spin lock, so any
other cpu can not handle this interrupt, and then the kernel executes the
handler, if there is a handler available for that interrupt.

When we are on the handler interrupt , maybe we need to lock the cpu till
we finish( if we are in a network driver, may we need to process some TX/RX
packets ),
so if we have to lock the code we can do a spin_lock().
But with a spin_lock, even other CPU's can execute part of your code(code
that is not part of the handler interrupt).
For example:

(this is an example in a network device driver)
The system has to transmit a packet, so network subsystem calls
ndo_start_xmit. Inside this function we take a lock disabling the
interrupts(spin_lock_irqsave) because we have to do some private things,
but suddenly an interrupt is raised and we go to the interrupt handler, we
take a spin_lock, we do some work (processing some RX/TX packets), and
exites from the interrupt handler, and then we come back to the
ndo_start_xmit when we were.

As far I could understand( I have read
http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-5-sect-5 ), spin_lock_irqsave only
disables the interrupts for the local cpu(where the code is executed),
so I think that another cpu took the handler interrupt.
The problem is if I'm working with irq disabled, because I have to handle a
private structure and suddenly interrupts is taking place, the interrupt
can manipulate the code that I'm trying to keep safe.
Is there any advice? Maybe that is happened because the code within my
critical section on ndo_start_xmit has to be atomic? Otherwise it can go to
sleep and I can lose my lock?

Thank you very much
Oscar Salvador
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