Re: help about handling interrupts

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Samuel Tardieu wrote:
> I'm afraid you are talking about different things; it looks like Igor
> means "signal" when he writes "interrupt", while you mean "hardware
> interrupt".

It seems to be a common problem that programming beginners mix
up terminology and get therefore confusing answers here, such as
"signal" versus "hardware interrupt" under Unix or "memory
access" versus "i/o port access". "Interrupt" can under Unix
indeed also refer to one special type of signal, the SIGINT
that a process receives when you press Ctrl-C on its controlling
shell.

Handling Unix signals is described in POSIX.1 if you want to use
the C API or in POSIX.5 if you want to use a native Ada API.
See the FLORIST package on <http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/florist.html>.

A note about the pain with standards:

I'd love to comment on the POSIX.5 way of handling signals,
but the copy of POSIX.5 which I ordered from IEEE many weeks ago
still has not arrived. Standards that are only available on
paper from low-quality-of-service publishers like IEEE and ISO
are a VERY BAD THING, not at all helpful for the spread of the
technology. If you are the editor of any standard, *please* make
sure that the documents are available freely online as well as
from a big book publisher such as Springer or Addison Wesley, and not
only from buerocrats like ISO/IEEE. The AdaRM has proofed
that this is easily possible (I got my AdaRM from Springer delivered
within 3 days, at the price of a normal university textbook),
so why not also for POSIX?

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>