4 ms·

Thanks for an awesome explanation. I always thought modern x86 uses IPI (Inter-Processor Interrupts) for that. Is there a benefit of mwait vs IPI?

• unsafecast 4y ago
  From the GP: >[...] but sending interrupts from one CPU to another (to break it out of hlt) is kind of expensive. The replacement is an instruction called mwait, which will (like hlt) wake the CPU up on interrupts, but will also wake up the CPU on a write to a specific memory address.