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
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