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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 a modern operating system, upon entry the execution context of a hardware interrupt handler is subtle. For reasons of performance, the handler will typically be initiated in the memory and execution context of the running process, to which it has no special connection (the interrupt is essentially usurping the running context—proces
That could carry a significant speed hit, since it requires switching between two memory address spaces every time there's a system call or a hardware interrupt request. Fix for Intel's massive ...
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. When a signal is sent, the operating system interrupts the target process' normal flow of execution to deliver the signal.
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.
For example, hardware timers send interrupts to the CPU at regular intervals. Most operating systems execute a HLT instruction when there is no immediate work to be done, putting the processor into an idle state. In Windows NT, for example, this instruction is run in the "System Idle Process". On x86 processors, the opcode of HLT is 0xF4.
An interrupt vector table (IVT) is a data structure that associates a list of interrupt handlers with a list of interrupt requests in a table of interrupt vectors. Each entry of the interrupt vector table, called an interrupt vector, is the address of an interrupt handler (also known as ISR). While the concept is common across processor ...