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Comment by themulticaster | Hacker News Reader

The user you replied to likely means something different: The priority of the event often depends on the exact contents on the event and not the hardware event source. For example, say you receive a "read request completed" interrupt from a storage device. The kernel now needs to pass on the data to the process which originally requested it. In order to know how urgent the original request and thus the handling of the interrupt is, the kernel needs to check which sector was read and associate it with a process. Merely knowing that it came from a specific storage device is not sufficient.

By the way, NMI still exist on x86 to this day, but AFAIK they're only used for serious machine-level issues and watchdog timeouts.

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This, too, can be done in hardware (if nothing else, with a small coprocessor).

This doesn't shed light

Generally, any given software can be done in hardware.

Specifically, we could attach small custom coprocessors to everything for the Linux kernel, and Linux could require them to do any sort of multitasking.

In practice, software allows us to customize these things and upgrade them and change them without tightly coupling us to a specific kernel and hardware design.

We already have specialised hardware for register mapping (which could be done in software, by the compiler, but generally isn't) and resolving instruction dependency graphs (which again, could be done by a compiler). Mapping interrupts to a hardware priority level feels like the same sort of task, to me.

> We already have specialised hardware for register mapping (which could be done in software, by the compiler, but generally isn't)

Wait, what? I’ve been out of compiler design for a couple decades, but that definitely used to be a thing.

They're probably referring to AMD Zen's speculative lifting of stack slots into physical registers (due to x86, phased out with Zen3 though), and more generally to OoO cores with far more physical than architectural registers.

We do register allocation in compilers, yes, but that has surprisingly little bearing on the actual microarchitectural register allocation. The priority when allocating registers these days is, iirc, avoiding false dependencies, not anything else.

Exactly the point. We can compile any piece of software that we want into hardware, but after that it is easier to change in software. Given the variety of unexpected ways in which hardware is used, in practice we went up moving some of what we expected to do in hardware, back into software.

This doesn't mean that moving logic into hardware can't be a win. It often is. But we should also expect that what has tended to wind up in software, will continue to do so in the future. And that includes complex decisions about the priority of interrupts.

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