Module 0216: Interrupts and system calls

Tak Auyeung, Ph.D.

April 14, 2010
1 About this module
2 Life without interrupts
 2.1 I/O interface
 2.2 To interact with an I/O device by polling
 2.3 Problems with polling
3 Interrupts
 3.1 Processor side
 3.2 Device side
 3.3 The advantages of interrupts
4 Privileges
5 System calls
6 Signals
 6.1 Default action
 6.2 Commonly used signals
7 Handling signals
 7.1 A signal handler
 7.2 Disposition of a signal
 7.3 sigaction
8 Common signals
 8.1 SIGALRM
 8.2 SIGSEGV
 8.3 SIGWINCH
 8.4 SIGINT
9 Sharing variables with ISRs and signal handlers
 9.1 The reason
 9.2 Symptoms
 9.3 But there’s more!
 9.4 To fix these problems
 9.5 What about data structures?