Tech Report

Eliminating Hardware Interrupts with Dispersed Interrupt Polling

Kirill Nagaitsev Kevin McAfee Kevin Hayes Justin Dong Nadharm Dhiantravan Peter Dinda PDF Available Online

Abstract

Each CPU on a modern architecture can receive thousands of hardware interrupts/second due to networking, I/O, and other events. In operating systems like Linux, interrupts cause expensive, hardware-driven context switches to the kernel and unexpected disruptions to caches and other hardware state. In HPC and database applications, for example, this results in significant performance impacts and unnecessary nondeterminism. Is it time to reconsider the alternative to interrupts, namely polling?