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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Can someone describe the process of pre-emption in UNIX? Post 302950165 by neutronscott on Tuesday 21st of July 2015 10:08:31 PM
Old 07-21-2015
A timer. Hardware interrupts are happening all the time which gives a vector for the kernel to regain control without programs cooperatively giving it up. Keyboard or network (as just two examples) input being available cause interrupts so we can handle the data before buffers overflow. The timer does this too at regular intervals every few hz (Linux i386 once defaulted to 1000, MIPS to 100). I imagine that's when the scheduler decides who goes next. It's not just when fork() is called. we'd never regain control like that.

when there is no work to do, calling the interrupt handler alone keeps the CPU a little busy and wastes some power so modern kernels have dynamic ticks.

So the timer interrupt causes this context switch, how does it work depends on the arch I suppose. I know in MIPS there was a jump table of exception handlers created and stored at the beginning of memory. When the timer ticked, the Interrupt exception handler is called. That in turn checked a status register to know which interrupt. Then you'd exit that into the next program that deserved attention.
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ddi_intr_hilevel(9F)					   Kernel Functions for Drivers 				      ddi_intr_hilevel(9F)

NAME
ddi_intr_hilevel - indicate interrupt handler type SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/ddi.h> #include <sys/sunddi.h> int ddi_intr_hilevel(dev_info_t *dip, uint_t inumber); INTERFACE LEVEL
Solaris DDI specific (Solaris DDI). PARAMETERS
dip Pointer to dev_info structure. inumber Interrupt number. DESCRIPTION
ddi_intr_hilevel() returns non-zero if the specified interrupt is a "high level" interrupt. High level interrupts must be handled without using system services that manipulate thread or process states, because these interrupts are not blocked by the scheduler. In addition, high level interrupt handlers must take care to do a minimum of work because they are not preemptable. A typical high level interrupt handler would put data into a circular buffer and schedule a soft interrupt by calling ddi_trigger_soft- intr(). The circular buffer could be protected by using a mutex that was properly initialized for the interrupt handler. ddi_intr_hilevel() can be used before calling ddi_add_intr() to decide which type of interrupt handler should be used. Most device drivers are designed with the knowledge that the devices they support will always generate low level interrupts, however some devices, for example those using SBus or VME bus level 6 or 7 interrupts must use this test because on some machines those interrupts are high level (above the scheduler level) and on other machines they are not. RETURN VALUES
non-zero indicates a high-level interrupt. CONTEXT
These functions can be called from user or interrupt context. SEE ALSO
ddi_add_intr(9F), mutex(9F) Writing Device Drivers SunOS 5.10 7 Jan 1992 ddi_intr_hilevel(9F)
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