On many modern processors, context switches are costly in terms of latency. In this report, we argue that latency caused by kernel thread scheduling for incoming network messages can be avoided in a number of common situations, where instead the interrupt handler itself can perform the necessary protocol processing. For processors with high context switch costs, this can give a significant perf...

This paper studies the performance of interrupt-driven kernels when subjected to heavy network traffic such as that of Gigabit Ethernet. Under heavy network traffic, the kernel performance will be negatively affected due to interrupt overhead caused by the incoming traffic. In particular, excessive latency and significant degradation in system throughput can be experienced. In this paper, we pr...

To minimize the time spent in the interrupt service routine (ISR), NT introduces the concept of deferred procedure calls (DPC). The priority of these DPCs is higher than the priority of user and system threads, but all DPCs run at the same priority. This makes that all DPCs are queued in FIFO order, and that the DPC of a high priority interrupt will only be executed when all the DPCs that were ...

This paper discusses to which extent the concept of anytime algorithms can be applied to parsing algorithms with feature uni cation We rst try to give a more precise de nition of what an anytime algorithm is We argue that parsing algorithms have to be classi ed as contract algorithms as opposed to truly interruptible algorithms With the restriction that the transaction being active at the time ...

Asynchronous interrupts abound in computing systems, yet they remain a thorny concept for both programming and verification practice. The ubiquity of interrupts underscores the importance of developing programming models to aid the development and verification of interrupt-driven programs. The research reported here recognizes asynchronous interrupts as a computational effect and encapsulates t...

A crucial aspect in the design of (embedded real-time) operating systems concerns interrupt handling. This paper presents the concept of a modularized interrupt-handling subsystem that enables the synchronization of interruptdriven, non-sequential code without the need to disabling hardware interrupts. The basic idea is to use nonblocking/optimistic concurrency sequences for synchronization ins...