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A signal is an asynchronous notification sent to a process or to a specific thread within the same process to notify it of an event. Common uses of signals are to interrupt, suspend, terminate or kill a process. Signals originated in 1970s Bell Labs Unix and were later specified in the POSIX standard.
The interrupt priority level (IPL) is a part of the current system interrupt state, which indicates the interrupt requests that will currently be accepted. The IPL may be indicated in hardware by the registers in a programmable interrupt controller , or in software by a bitmask or integer value and source code of threads.
In computing, a keyboard controller is a device that interfaces a keyboard to a computer. Its main function is to inform the computer when a key is pressed or released. When data from the keyboard arrives, the controller raises an interrupt (a keyboard interrupt) to allow the CPU to handle the input.
A context switch can also occur as the result of an interrupt, such as when a task needs to access disk storage, freeing up CPU time for other tasks. Some operating systems also require a context switch to move between user mode and kernel mode tasks. The process of context switching can have a negative impact on system performance. [3]: 28
Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) are a method of signaling interrupts, using special in-band messages to replace traditional out-of-band signals on dedicated interrupt lines. While message signaled interrupts are more complex to implement in a device, they have some significant advantages over pin-based out-of-band interrupt signalling, such ...
In a computer, an interrupt request (or IRQ) is a hardware signal sent to the processor that temporarily stops a running program and allows a special program, an interrupt handler, to run instead. Hardware interrupts are used to handle events such as receiving data from a modem or network card , key presses, or mouse movements.
A hardware interrupt is a condition related to the state of the hardware that may be signaled by an external hardware device, e.g., an interrupt request (IRQ) line on a PC, or detected by devices embedded in processor logic (e.g., the CPU timer in IBM System/370), to communicate that the device needs attention from the operating system (OS) [7] or, if there is no OS, from the bare metal ...
In response to an interrupt, there is a context switch, and the code for the interrupt is loaded and executed. The job of a FLIH is to quickly service the interrupt, or to record platform-specific critical information which is only available at the time of the interrupt, and schedule the execution of a SLIH for further long-lived interrupt ...