In some cases, the low-level hardware interrupt handler must schedule a higher-level thread to run. In this scenario, the interrupt handler will return and indicate that an event is to be delivered. This introduces a second form of latency—scheduling latency—which must be accounted for.
Scheduling latency is the time between the last instruction of the user's interrupt handler and the execution of the first instruction of a driver thread. This usually means the time it takes to save the context of the currently executing thread and restore the context of the required driver thread. Although larger than interrupt latency, this time is also kept small in a QNX Neutrino system.
Figure 1. Interrupt handler terminates, returning an event.It's important to note that most interrupts terminate without delivering an event. In a large number of cases, the interrupt handler can take care of all hardware-related issues. Delivering an event to wake up a higher-level driver thread occurs only when a significant event occurs. For example, the interrupt handler for a serial device driver would feed one byte of data to the hardware upon each received transmit interrupt, and would trigger the higher-level thread within (devc-ser*) only when the output buffer is nearly empty.