Ep 088: Introduction to Interrupts

Polled I/O has its drawbacks, specifically, it takes precious time away from the processor to simply check a status flag. This hurts performance. In this lesson, we present the theory behind processor interrupts and show how they overcome this major drawback of polled I/O. Takeaways: At the completion of this lesson, each student should be able to: • explain the general operation of a processor interrupt, • explain how interrupts improve performance over polled I/O, • define interrupt service routines, and • describe how the state of a processor task is saved before servicing an interrupt. #interrupt #processor #io #isr