GATE CSE 1998 | Question: 1.18

Question

Which of the following devices should get higher priority in assigning interrupts?

• A. Hard disk
• B. Printer
• C. Keyboard
• D. Floppy disk

Comments

How can we understand priority among those?

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among these options  can say that keyboard has the maximum priority. but if options are different , how we can comment?

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@shree

Check this: https://gateoverflow.in/1657/gate1998-1-20

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In peripherals, priority is given based on the speed of the device. Higher the speed, higher the priority. Hard disk has the highest speed(MBps) among the given options and thus has the highest priority. Whereas, keyboard is the slowest one because we humans write so slow(like 1-3 word per second) when compared to CPU, and thus keyboard has lowest priority. You may have noticed sometimes that when you are copying/moving a large file on to your hard disk from other device, like pen drive, and then you try to type something using keyboard the typed words are shown with some lag. This is because of the priority being given to hard disk right now.

Answer 1

It should be a Hard disk. I don't think there is a rule like that. But hard disk makes sense compared to others here. 

http://www.ibm1130.net/functional/IOInterrupts.html

Comments

What if I press “ctrl +c” command to terminate some process or might be I gave “sudo rm -rf /” and suddenly press ctrl + c, I believe keyboard should be given more priority.

What do you say?

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sir you roast students lol

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That time lapse is sufficient to handle the interrupt . It is not in sec it is in msec

Answer 2

Answer: (A)

Devices with high speed get more priority in assigning interrupts.

Here is the explanation taken from Morris Mano:

Answer 3

Hard disk should be given higher priority as all user programs and OS are stored in here.

Comments

No doubt, it's (C) keyboard has the highest priority of them all.

 

It's a rule. From highest to lowest.

THERMAL MONITOR -> LOCK -> KEYBOARD -> SERIAL PORT -> HDD -> FLOPPY DISK -> PRINTER

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@krishna

Please provide references me too think it should be keyboard.

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Highest priority is given to the device which has high probability of data loss.

Answer 4

Devices with high speed transfer such as Hard disk (according to given options it has high speed among all) are given high priority, and slow devices such as keyboard receive low priority.

So, clearly Hard disk is answer. Option (A).

Check the similar one:

https://gateoverflow.in/2113/gate2011-11