Abstract

Interrupt mechanisms help the CPU to manage various I/O devices efficiently by alleviating the burden of periodically checking on the attached devices. However, the frequent NIC interrupts due to heavy network traffic can force the operating system to collapse. This is especially critical for systems such as servers and gateways, for which network packet processing is the major function. These systems tend to spend all the resources servicing the interrupts generated by the NICs and leave no resources to do anything else. Even though some of the packets are received, they are subsequently dropped because no CPU is available to process them. This is the well-known "receive livelock" problem.

Citations