Don't Interrupt Me; We're Almost Done!

This chapter looked at interrupts, a hardware resource used by devices to asynchronously signal the processor. Interrupts, in effect, are used by hardware to interrupt the operating system.

Most modern hardware uses interrupts to communicate with operating systems. The device driver that manages a given piece of hardware registers an interrupt handler to respond to and process interrupts issued from their associated hardware. Work performed in interrupts includes acknowledging and resetting hardware, copying data from the device to main memory and vice versa, processing hardware requests, and sending out new hardware requests.

The kernel provides interfaces for registering and unregistering interrupt handlers, disabling interrupts, masking out interrupt lines, and checking the status of the interrupt system. Table 6.2 provided an overview of many of these functions.

Because interrupts interrupt other executing code (processes, the kernel itself, and even other interrupt handlers), they must execute quickly. Often, however, there is a lot of work to do. To balance the large amount of work with the need for quick execution, the kernel divides the work of processing interrupts into two halves. The interrupt handler, the top half, was discussed in this chapter. Now, let's look at the bottom half.