Patent ID: 7451454

Claim:
A method comprising: initializing a computer system, the computer system including an application processor to execute applications and processes in the computer system and a bootstrap processor to initialize the computer system; declaring the application processor to be dedicated to handling a polling function for a timer interrupt process for the computer system, wherein a normal execution thread is to be processed by the bootstrap processor, and wherein the timer interrupt process is the only method of asynchronous event handling that is available to the computer system; setting a timer for a plurality of time intervals for the timer interrupt process; calling a polling function at the end of each of the plurality of time intervals, the polling function being performed by the application processor, the polling function to determine if any special events have occurred; and if the polling function results in a positive result, processing the results of the polling function with the bootstrap processor; wherein the polling function performed by the application processor comprises event handling for a network stack by polling a network interface card (NIC) of the computer system.