Interruptible operating system

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An interruptible operating system^[1] is an operating system with ability to handle multiple interrupts concurrently, or in other words, which allow interrupts to be interrupted.

Concurrent interrupt handling essentially mean concurrent execution of kernel code and hence induces the additional complexity of concurrency control in accessing kernel datastructures.

It also means that the system can stop any program that is already running, which is a feature on nearly all modern operating systems.

References

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^ Chen, Hao; Wu, Xiongnan (Newman); Shao, Zhong; Lockerman, Joshua; Gu, Ronghui (2 June 2016). "Toward compositional verification of interruptible OS kernels and device drivers". dl.acm.org. Association for Computing Machinery, Proceedings of the 37th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. pp. 431–447. doi:10.1145/2908080.2908101 . Retrieved 19 August 2025.

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Operating systems

General

Variants

Kernel

Architectures	Exokernel Hybrid Microkernel Monolithic Multikernel vkernel Rump kernel Unikernel
Components	Device driver Loadable kernel module User space and kernel space

Process management

Concepts	Computer multitasking (Cooperative, Preemptive) Context switch Interrupt IPC Process Process control block Real-time Thread Time-sharing
Scheduling algorithms	Fixed-priority preemptive Multilevel feedback queue Round-robin Shortest job next