IRQ's?

[DirtylilTechBoy]

What is an IRQ and what purpose does it serve?? (looking for visual imagery)

 

[Nothinman]

Basically an IRQ is used by the hardware on that IRQ to say 'look at me, I have data!'. Otherwise the OS would have to run through all the hardware periodically and see if it has any data ready.

 

[DirtylilTechBoy]

Basically, an IRQ is a flag on a long road of options that says "look at me"??

Is this a good way to look at it or are there better anologies out there??

 

[neuralfx]

thats a good analogy .. irq is Interrupt ReQuest .. basically each device needs data ( such as i/o) looked at and processed by the cpu, the IRQ is the flag/tag/identifier that each device uses so the processor knows who is sending the data to it, and where to send the processed data .. i guess thats an ok explanation .. maybe someone else can do a better job ..
-neural