input editing at interrupt time (was Re: tty driver advice)

[chris at mimsy.UUCP]

In article <14304 at sun.uucp> guy%gorodish at Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>A streams-based driver could do the canonicalization in a service
>procedure; they are not run at interrupt priority level.

Actually, I had considered that.  A rather standard scheme for
interrupt processing is to drop the event into a queue, then schedule
a special process to run it.  That process is, in essence, an
interrupt (and is often implemented using software interrupts).

4.2 and 4.3BSD use this scheme for network input.  That is the
difference between splnet() and splimp(): the former blocks software
input interrupts, while the latter blocks hardware input interrupts.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690)
UUCP:	seismo!mimsy!chris	ARPA/CSNet:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu