Hi,
thepowersgang wrote:
... if you're going to be sarcastic, please mark it as such.
Yes, x86 (and to a lesser extent ARM) are kinda crazy at the architecture level, but interrupts are not the example you should pick (interrupts are one of the best low-level features if you want any form of performance)
I do (however) kinda agree that we need to rethink platforms to get better multi-core performance, and that's the direction systems research should be looking (that and working on new languages that make multi-threading easier to get correct)
I'm not too sure what Geri was thinking; however...
It actually would be nice to get rid of IRQs and replace them with "hardware messages"; where a hardware message interrupts the currently running code (just like an IRQ would have), but consists of a "sender ID" (to identify the device that sent the IRQ) and some sort of device specific "status dword" (to identify the reason why the device is requesting attention - so the driver can figure out what it needs to do before/without touching the device's registers).
Cheers,
Brendan