Fast Interrupt Priority Management in Operating System Kernels

摘要

This paper describes a new technique, optimistic interrupt protection, thatefficiently schedules and handles processor interrupts. While modern processor architectures have led to substantial overall performance improvements, operating systems have received significantly less benefit than application code 1,2,3. One processor function that has not scaled well with processor speed is interrupt management. Operating systems use interrupts to control scheduling and input/output, and use interrupt masking to guarantee integrity of system resources shared across interrupt levels. This approach was efficient in many previous processor architectures (e.g, VAX), where the cost changing interrupt