If a hardware irq handler shares data with a softirq, you have two concerns. Firstly, the softirq processing can be interrupted by a hardware interrupt, and secondly, the critical region could be entered by a hardware interrupt on another CPU. This is where spin_lock_irq() is used. It is defined to disable interrupts on that cpu, then grab the lock. spin_unlock_irq() does the reverse.

The irq handler does not to use spin_lock_irq(), because the softirq cannot run while the irq handler is running: it can use spin_lock(), which is slightly faster. The only exception would be if a different hardware irq handler uses the same lock: spin_lock_irq() will stop that from interrupting us.

This works perfectly for UP as well: the spin lock vanishes, and this macro simply becomes local_irq_disable() (include/asm/smp.h), which protects you from the softirq/tasklet/BH being run.

spin_lock_irqsave() (include/linux/spinlock.h) is a variant which saves whether interrupts were on or off in a flags word, which is passed to spin_unlock_irqrestore(). This means that the same code can be used inside an hard irq handler (where interrupts are already off) and in softirqs (where the irq disabling is required).

Note that softirqs (and hence tasklets and timers) are run on return from hardware interrupts, so spin_lock_irq() also stops these. In that sense, spin_lock_irqsave() is the most general and powerful locking function.