Multithreading and Interrupts
- by Nicholas Flynt
I'm doing some work on the input buffers for my kernel, and I had some questions. On Dual Core machines, I know that more than one "process" can be running simultaneously. What I don't know is how the OS and the individual programs work to protect collisions in data.
There are two things I'd like to know on this topic:
(1) Where do interrupts occur? Are they guaranteed to occur on one core and not the other, and could this be used to make sure that real-time operations on one core were not interrupted by, say, file IO which could be handled on the other core? (I'd logically assume that the interrupts would happen on the 1st core, but is that always true, and how would you tell? Or perhaps does each core have its own settings for interrupts? Wouldn't that lead to a scenario where each core could react simultaneously to the same interrupt, possibly in different ways?)
(2) How does the dual core processor handle opcode memory collision? If one core is reading an address in memory at exactly the same time that another core is writing to that same address in memory, what happens? Is an exception thrown, or is a value read? (I'd assume the write would work either way.) If a value is read, is it guaranteed to be either the old or new value at the time of the collision?
I understand that programs should ideally be written to avoid these kinds of complications, but the OS certainly can't expect that, and will need to be able to handle such events without choking on itself.
