Patent ID: 7617389

Claim:
An event notifying method comprising: notifying one or a plurality of events from a device to a processor by storing said one or plurality of events in a queue in a processor system having one or a plurality of processors; managing a number of non-notified events existing in the queue by a counter unit which is incremented when an event is generated and is decremented with respect to an event that is extracted from the queue by the processor, said non-notified events being the events that are stored in the queue but are not yet extracted from the queue; and controlling a time of notifying the processor, including temporarily permitting a negative value of the counter unit as an inconsistent state of the counter unit caused by differences in updating timings of the counter unit from the device and the processor until updating of the counter unit to resume a normal state of the counter unit, according to the updating state of the counter unit and one or more value states of the counter unit including the negative value.