CS 432 Project 1 --- Fall 1997 -- Interrupt Handling

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Interrupt Handling

Your kernel will respond to interrupts by sending a message describing the interrupt to a mailbox associated with the interrupt level. To make this possible, you must include declarations for three mail boxes in your program and initialize them in your kernel when the system starts up. This should be done by defining an array of mail boxes:

struct mbox interruptBox[3]

Level 1 interrupts should result in sending messages to "interruptBox[0]" and level 3 interrupts should send to "interruptBox[2]". The message sent should contain the exception code passed to the interrupt handler as the "value" field of the message.

I feel that I owe you a brief apology or explanation for the way in which I have asked you to handle interrupts. It was designed to be an appropriate way to handle interrupts if you were planning a general purpose kernel for the 34000 without a clear idea of either what input/output devices would be connected to the machine or what software would be using the kernel's services. Given that you know all you want to do is handle five terminals, it might make more sense to have the kernel turn interrupts into sends to one of five mailboxes. Unfortunately, I want to pretend that this is a general purpose kernel. Please humor me.