One of the features of x86 architecture is ability to spread interrupts evenly among multiple cores. Benefits of such configuration seems to be obvious. Interrupts consume CPU time and by spreading them on all cores we avoid bottle-necks. I’ve written an article explaining this mechanism in greater detail. Yet let me remind you how it […]

Today I finished working on a new article called “SMP affinity and proper interrupt handling in Linux”. It describes a problem encountered by many system engineers and administrators and that is how to configure the system to properly handle interrupts. This article concludes a research that I did, those purpose was to find out what […]

Introduction Hardware interrupts has always been expensive. Somehow these small pieces of software consume so much CPU power and hardware and software engineers has always been trying to change this state of affairs. Some significant progress has been made. Still hardware interrupts consume lots of CPU power. You will rarely see effects of interrupt handling […]