2.3. Interrupts

An interrupt is the mechanism that a device uses to signal the kernel that it needs attention and some immediate processing is required on behalf of that device. Solaris services interrupts by context-switching out the current thread running on a processor and executing an interrupt handler for the interrupting device. For example, when a packet is received on a network interface, the network controller initiates an interrupt to begin processing the packet.

2.3.1. Interrupt Priorities

Solaris assigns priorities to interrupts to allow overlapping interrupts to be handled with the correct precedence; for example, a network interrupt can be configured to have a higher priority than a disk interrupt.

The kernel implements 15 interrupt ...

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