Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: User interrupts (UINTR) is a new hardware feature available in recent Intel Xeon processors. It enables a CPU to send, receive, and handle hardware inter-processor interrupts directly in user mode, %(ring 3), meaning without the intervention of the OS kernel. In this paper, we shed light on the inner working of this facility and investigate, with detailed performance and overhead measurements considering deployments on physical machines and virtual machines with Linux and KVM, how it can be leveraged for more efficient inter-process communications, as an alternative to OS (Unix) signals. With UINTR, preemptive user-level thread schedulers can achieve quantum lengths in the microsecond scale.
Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, Université de Toulouse, Institut polytechnique de Grenoble, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, Université Grenoble Alpes, University of Neuchâtel
Language: English
Subfield: Hardware and Architecture
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411411516