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4.2: Interrupts

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    What is an Interrupt

    An interrupt is a signal emitted by hardware or software when a process or an event needs immediate attention. It alerts the processor to a high priority process requiring interruption of the current working process. In I/O devices one of the bus control lines is dedicated for this purpose and is called the Interrupt Service Routine (ISR).

    When a device raises an interrupt at lets say process i, the processor first completes the execution of instruction i. Then it loads the Program Counter (PC) with the address of the first instruction of the ISR. Before loading the Program Counter with the address, the address of the interrupted instruction is moved to a temporary location. Therefore, after handling the interrupt the processor can continue with process i+1.

    While the processor is handling the interrupts, it must inform the device that its request has been recognized so that it stops sending the interrupt request signal. Also, saving the registers so that the interrupted process can be restored in the future, increases the delay between the time an interrupt is received and the start of the execution of the ISR. This is called Interrupt Latency.

    Hardware Interrupts:
    In a hardware interrupt, all the devices are connected to the Interrupt Request Line. A single request line is used for all the n devices. To request an interrupt, a device closes its associated switch. When a device requests an interrupts, the value of INTR is the logical OR of the requests from individual devices.

    Sequence of events involved in handling an IRQ:

    1. Devices raise an IRQ.
    2. Processor interrupts the program currently being executed.
    3. Device is informed that its request has been recognized and the device deactivates the request signal.
    4. The requested action is performed.
    5. Interrupt is enabled and the interrupted program is resumed.

    Conceptually an interrupt causes the following to happen:

    As time moves from left to right, and the code is being executed, when an interrupt happens, control is passed to the interrupt service routine. Once that routine is complete control passes back to the original process where it was interrupted.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Concept of an interrupt. ("Concept of an Interrupt" by lemilxavier, WikiBooks is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

    The grey bars represent the control flow. The top line is the program that is currently running, and the bottom bar is the interrupt service routine (ISR). Notice that when the interrupt (Int) occurs, the program stops executing and the microcontroller begins to execute the ISR. Once the ISR is complete, the microcontroller returns to processing the program where it left off.

    Handling Multiple Devices:
    When more than one device raises an interrupt request signal, then additional information is needed to decide which which device to be considered first. The following methods are used to decide which device to select: Polling, Vectored Interrupts, and Interrupt Nesting. These are explained as following below.

    1. Polling:
      In polling, the first device encountered with with IRQ bit set is the device that is to be serviced first. Appropriate ISR is called to service the same. It is easy to implement but a lot of time is wasted by interrogating the IRQ bit of all devices.
    2. Vectored Interrupts:
      In vectored interrupts, a device requesting an interrupt identifies itself directly by sending a special code to the processor over the bus. This enables the processor to identify the device that generated the interrupt. The special code can be the starting address of the ISR or where the ISR is located in memory, and is called the interrupt vector.
    3. Interrupt Nesting:
      In this method, I/O device is organized in a priority structure. Therefore, interrupt request from a higher priority device is recognized where as request from a lower priority device is not. To implement this each process/device (even the processor). Processor accepts interrupts only from devices/processes having priority more than it.

    What happens when external hardware requests another interrupt while the processor is already in the middle of executing the ISR for a previous interrupt request?

    When the first interrupt was requested, hardware in the processor causes it to finish the current instruction, disable further interrupts, and jump to the interrupt handler.

    The processor ignores further interrupts until it gets to the part of the interrupt handler that has the "return from interrupt" instruction, which re-enables interrupts.

    If an interrupt request occurs while interrupts were turned off, some processors will immediately jump to that interrupt handler as soon as interrupts are turned back on. With this sort of processor, an interrupt storm "starves" the main loop background task. Other processors execute at least one instruction of the main loop before handling the interrupt, so the main loop may execute extremely slowly, but at least it never "starves".

    A few processors have an interrupt controller that supports "round robin scheduling", which can be used to prevent a different kind of "starvation" of low-priority interrupt handlers.

    Processors priority is encoded in a few bits of PS (Process Status register). It can be changed by program instructions that write into the PS. Processor is in supervised mode only while executing OS routines. It switches to user mode before executing application programs

    Adapted from:
    "Interrupts" by lemilxavier, Geeks for Geeks is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
    "Microprocessor Design/Interrupts" by lemilxavier, WikiBooks is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

    This page titled 4.2: Interrupts is shared under a CC BY-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Patrick McClanahan.