interruptDont

InterruptDont is a term used in computing to describe a practice or mechanism intended to prevent interrupt handling for a brief period, in order to protect a critical section from preemption. The phrase is not standardized and may appear as a function name, macro, pragma, or documentation convention in various codebases. The underlying idea is to create atomicity by temporarily stopping or masking interrupts so that shared data or state can be updated without interference.

In practice, interruptDont concepts appear in different forms depending on the system. In low-level embedded programming, developers may explicitly disable interrupts around a critical section to ensure data integrity. In higher-level frameworks, equivalent behavior is achieved through mutexes, locks, or non-preemptive scheduling, rather than directly masking hardware interrupts. The exact mechanism and scope of interruption avoidance vary by architecture, compiler, and operating system.

Advantages of interruptDont approaches include simpler reasoning about data integrity during small, well-defined operations and reduced risk of partial updates. However, they carry risks such as increased interrupt latency, potential missed urgent events, deadlock, and priority inversion if not carefully bounded and documented. Best practices emphasize keeping protected regions as short as possible and favoring higher-level synchronization primitives where feasible.

See also: critical section, disable interrupts, mutex, non-preemptive execution. While interruptDont is not a universal standard, understanding its intent helps clarify how systems balance responsiveness with correctness in concurrent operations.