Event Driven and Interrupt Handling Questions

Covers the principles of event driven programming and low level interrupt handling as used in embedded and real time systems. Topics include what interrupts are, how interrupt service routines work, interrupt priorities and nesting, masking and disabling interrupts, and trade offs between latency and throughput. Also includes event driven design patterns such as callbacks, event loops, debouncing and throttling, handling concurrency and race conditions that arise from asynchronous events, and techniques for protecting critical sections and ensuring atomicity. Candidates should be able to reason about timing constraints, real time requirements, hardware versus software events, and design simple handlers and coordination mechanisms for safe, timely response to external events.