Software Interrupt Overhead Reduction via Request Accumulation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Interrupt-driven processors face significant performance degradation and overhead due to frequent software interrupts, which are necessary for security checks, leading to lost data and inefficient resource utilization, especially in high-traffic systems like network operations.
Innovation Solution
An application process accumulates service requests in a data container block and issues a single software interrupt to the kernel, which then performs all accumulated requests, reducing the number of interrupts from N to one and minimizing overhead.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If application code issues separate software interrupts for each service request, then security checks are performed for each request, but system processing overhead increases significantly and performance degrades
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple separate service requests into a single accumulated data structure that is processed through one software interrupt. The application accumulates multiple service requests in a data container block and issues a single interrupt to the kernel, which then processes all accumulated requests in one handler execution, reducing overhead while maintaining security checks for each request
Solution Approach 2:
The application performs preliminary accumulation of service request data in a data container block before issuing the software interrupt. This preliminary action consolidates multiple requests so that the kernel can process them all in a single interrupt handler execution, reducing the frequency of interrupt processing while maintaining individual request security validation
2Ease of operation
If the operating system handles each service request through separate software interrupts, then each request is processed individually, but the time required for interrupt handling increases and resource consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple individual service requests are merged into a single data structure containing all requests. The kernel's interrupt handler then processes all requests in this accumulated data structure in one execution cycle, reducing total interrupt handling time while maintaining the ability to process each request individually through sequential iteration over the data container
3Reliability
If software interrupts are used for service requests, then security constraints are enforced, but data loss may occur when interrupts are disabled during processing
Solution Approach 1:
The application accumulates all service request data in a data container block before issuing the software interrupt. This preliminary accumulation ensures that all necessary data is ready in memory before the interrupt handler executes, eliminating the need for the handler to disable interrupts during data collection and thus preventing data loss while maintaining security constraint enforcement
Data Source
AI summary
An application process operates at a privilege level lower than that of the kernel code of the operating system in which the process executes. When the application process requires performance of an operating system service for which the process lacks sufficient privileges to perform directly, rather than repeatedly requesting the service by issuing separate software interrupts, the process instead accumulates the data corresponding to the different service requests in a data container block and defers performance of the service. Whenever the process needs to complete the service, rather than deferring its performance, the process issues a single software interrupt that causes the kernel to use the accumulated data in the data container block to perform each of the N accumulated service requests. This reduces the number of interrupts that must be handled from N to one, thereby greatly reducing the overhead imposed by interrupt handling.