Differences between version 5 and previous revision of IRQ.
Other diffs: Previous Major Revision, Previous Author, or view the Annotated Edit History
| Newer page: | version 5 | Last edited on Thursday, July 1, 2004 11:19:29 am | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
| Older page: | version 4 | Last edited on Friday, November 15, 2002 6:13:31 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -1,7 +1,9 @@
An [Acronym] for __I__nterrupt __R__e__Q__uest.
-In a typical computer, when a piece of hardware has finished doing a task, it raises an interrupt and the operating system runs a special handler
to do something based on this. (This is sometimes also called a trap).
+In a typical computer, when a piece of hardware has finished doing a task, it raises an interrupt and the operating system runs a special small piece of code
+(called an InterruptHandler)
to do something based on this. (This is sometimes
+
also called a trap).
That sounds very vague, so maybe some examples.
* A user program writes some data to a file, and the operating system probably caches it in a buffer. Eventually this buffer gets written to disk. The operating system is responsible for sending the data to disk, and when the disk has finished writing, it signals to the OS that it has finished via an interrupt, at which point the kernel can return from its write function.
