March 2003
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
27h 17m
English
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4.4. Synchronizing with the hardware: Events and the WAIT operation
We have seen above that the operating system's support for processes must include the provision of a WAIT operation to allow processes to synchronize with the hardware. The term 'event' will be used to include the arrival of an interrupt signal from a device.
This operation might be provided as a WAIT for one specific event, for any one event or for any one of a selected set of events. (The logical possibility of waiting for all of a set of events makes little sense: interrupts need to be processed rapidly.) Possible hardware events are relatively small in number and are known at system design time. This set of possible events can easily be encoded as an integer, representing ...