How Interrupts Work: and why they are better than polling

An interrupt is a signal that causes the CPU to alter its normal flow of instruction execution. It is a much more efficient model than polling as polling requires the CPU to check devices regardless of whether they needed to be or not. This frees CPU from waiting for events and expensive context switching and provides control for external I/O initiation.
In this video we discuss the following hardware components required to make interrupts work:
Interrupt Lines
Interrupt Requests
Context
Interrupt Vector Table (IVT)
Interrupt Service Routines (ISR) (also known as drivers)
This video is part of a full semester course in Computer Organization and Architecture. You can see all of the topics in the course here: • Computer Organization ...
This video is part of the I/O topic with in the course, the video prior to this one is an introduction to I/O, discussing the challenges inherit to connecting extremely varied devices to the CPU. You can see it here: • Introduction to Input ...
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If you have not seen the Little Man Computer (LMC) series of videos, they explore how a computer works at it most fundamental level. You can find them here:
A recommended introduction to Little Man computer video here: • Little Man Computer Ex...
A "Hello LMC" video where we do a smaller program and talk more in-depth about the instruction cycle and basic instructions: • Little Man Computer (L...
And an intermediate step where we introduce branching and explore recreating conditional statements with LMC: • Little Man Computer (L...
Finally we explore iteration, labels and advanced LMC: • Little Man Computer (L...
Here are presentation slides that can be used as a supplement to follow along and as a future reference for this content: drive.google.c...