For most UNIX systems, Linux included, device drivers typically divide the work of processing interrupts into two parts or halves. The first part, the top half, is the familiar interrupt handler, ...

A "wait queue" in the kernel is a data structure that allows one or more processes to wait (sleep) until something of interest happens. They are used throughout the kernel to wait for available memory ...

This article is part of the LWN Porting Drivers to 2.6 series. This article continues the look at request queues in 2.6; if you've not read the first part in the request queue series, you may want to ...