Interrupt Threads
Several operating systems - Solaris, NetBSD, Mac OS X, WinCE and FreeBSD, for example — use different scheme known as interrupt threads. An interrupt handler provided by the device driver is just a high-priority thread which runs with interrupts enabled and, more importantly, may block on mutex. This greatly simplifies locking in the kernel. In addition, an interrupt thread may be preempted by some higher-priority interrupt thread.
Read more about this topic: Interrupt Handler
Famous quotes containing the words interrupt and/or threads:
“Never interrupt a murderer, madame.”
—Walter Reisch (1903–1963)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)