Interrupts
The MTA has no hardware interrupts!
- I guess this is one solution to the nasty problem of interrupts in a multithreaded environment!
Recall that an interrupt is a way for an external device to gain the attention of the processor
- The MTA dedicates one thread called the listener to poll for interrupts
- When an interrupt is detected, the listener services the interrupt by starting a new thread
- The listener also services traditional clock related interrupts.