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