Understanding Intel User Interrupts
User interrupts (UINTR) is a new hardware feature available in recent Intel Xeon processors. It enables a CPU to send, receive, and handle hardware inter-processor interrupts directly in user mode, %(ring 3), meaning without the intervention of the OS kernel. In this paper, we shed light on the inner working of this facility and investigate, with detailed performance and overhead measurements considering deployments on physical machines and virtual machines with Linux and KVM, how it can be leveraged for more efficient inter-process communications, as an alternative to OS (Unix) signals. With UINTR, preemptive user-level thread schedulers can achieve quantum lengths in the microsecond scale.
Authors
- Alain Tchana (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7789-8400)
- Renaud Lachaize (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9090-7287)
- Pascal Felber (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1574-6721)
- Louis Duval
- Daniel Hagimont (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0978-2155)
- Yves Kone (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2569-5741)
Institutions
- Institut polytechnique de Grenoble (FR)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (FR)
- Université Fédérale de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées (FR)
- Université Toulouse-I-Capitole (FR)
- Centre Inria de l'Université Grenoble Alpes (FR)
- Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (FR)
- Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (FR)
- Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès (FR)
- Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux (FR)
- University of Neuchâtel (CH)
- Université Grenoble Alpes (FR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
- Published
- 2025-06-16
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3744970.3727326
- Primary Topic
- Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA)
- Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes