Polling efficiently on stock hardware
Marc Feeley · 1993
Two strategies for supporting asynchronous interrupts are: the use of the processor's hardware interrupt system and the use of polling. The advantages of polling include: portability, simplicity, and low cost for handling interrupts. Unfortunately, polling has an overhead for the explicit interrupt checks inserted in the code. This paper describes balanced polling , a method for placing the interrupt checks which has a low overhead and also guarantees an upper bound on interrupt latency. This method has been used by Gambit (an optimizing native code compiler for Scheme) to support a number of features including multiprocessing and stack overflow detection. The overhead of balanced polling is less than for call-return polling which places interrupt checks at every procedure entry and exit. The overhead of call-return polling is typically 70% larger (but sometimes over 400% larger) than the overhead of balanced polling. 1 Introduction In this paper, the term interrupt is defined as an ...