Hi. First: Thanks, Anish, for your quick response. Does this mean that once you are disabling interrupts, these interrupts are lost ? even later, when we will enable interrupts, the interrupts from the past that should have been created (but interrupts were disabled at that time interval) are in fact lost? And once you mask interrupts, these interrupts are not lost, but these masked interrupts will be handled later when the interrupt is unmasked ? Did I understand correctly ? rgs Kevin On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 5:00 PM, anish singh <anish198519851985@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 7:28 PM, Kevin Wilson <wkevils@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hello, >> what is the difference between disabling interrupts and masking >> interrupts ? Disabling interrupts is done, AFAIK, with irq_disable(). > Disabling interrupts means that you have disabled the source of interrupt. > Masking means that you are not(CPU) going to handle the interrupts until it is > unmasked. >> (see below) >> Can someone gives an example of how to mask interrupts >> with x86/x86_64 ? > Not familiar with x86. Try asking in kernel mailing list.I guess you > will get more help there. >> >> irq_disable() in x86 goes to native_irq_disable(), which >> eventually calls assembler "cli" command: >> >> CLI clears the IF bit in the flags. >> >> >> static inline void native_irq_disable(void) >> { >> asm volatile("cli": : :"memory"); >> } >> see arch/x86/include/asm/irqflags.h >> >> rgs, >> Kevin >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Kernelnewbies mailing list >> Kernelnewbies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >> http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies _______________________________________________ Kernelnewbies mailing list Kernelnewbies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies