Interrupt latency is the time from the assertion of a hardware interrupt until the first instruction of the device driver's interrupt handler is executed.
The OS leaves interrupts fully enabled almost all the time, so that interrupt latency is typically insignificant. But certain critical sections of code do require that interrupts be temporarily disabled. The maximum such disable time usually defines the worst-case interrupt latency—in QNX Neutrino this is very small.
The following diagrams illustrate the case where a hardware interrupt is processed by an established interrupt handler. The interrupt handler either will simply return, or it will return and cause an event to be delivered.
Figure 1. Interrupt handler simply terminates.The interrupt latency (Til) in the above diagram represents the minimum latency—that which occurs when interrupts were fully enabled at the time the interrupt occurred. Worst-case interrupt latency will be this time plus the longest time in which the OS, or the running system process, disables CPU interrupts.