Patent ID: 7200700

Claim:
A shared-IRQ user-defined interrupt signal handling method for use on a computer platform equipped with a programmable interrupt controller, an interrupt-configurable peripheral interface, and an interrupt-nonconfigurable peripheral interface, where the interrupt-configurable peripheral interface and the interrupt-nonconfigurable peripheral interface share a set of system interrupt lines of the computer platform, for providing a user-defined interrupt signal handling function for handing each user-defined interrupt signal issued by a peripheral device connected to the interrupt-configurable peripheral interface; the shared-IRQ user-defined interrupt signal handling method comprising: building an interrupt configuration table for defining a virtual device for the interrupt-configurable peripheral interface as well as each specific system interrupt line that is shared by both the interrupt-configurable peripheral interface and the interrupt nonconfigurable peripheral interface; in actual operation, listening to each user-defined interrupt signal issued by each peripheral device connected to the interrupt-configurable peripheral interface and responsively issuing an interrupt processing enable message; responding to the interrupt processing enable message by consulting the interrupt configuration table to find out which peripheral device connected to the interrupt nonconfigurable peripheral interface share the same system interrupt line with the peripheral device issuing the user-defined interrupt signal, and then consulting a configuration register associated with the interrupt-nonconfigurable peripheral interface to find out the shared system interrupt line; and via the system interrupt line, activating a driver program associated with the peripheral device issuing the user-defined interrupt signal to thereby allow the activated driver program to be executed via the system interrupt line to handle the request from the peripheral device issuing the user-defined interrupt signal.