A system and technique provides fast acknowledgement and servicing of interrupt
sources coupled to a high latency path of an intermediate node of a computer network.
An external device coupled to the high latency path is provided with a separate
interrupt signal for each type of interrupt supported by a processor of the intermediate
node. Each interrupt signal is directly fed to an interrupt multiplexing device
over a first low latency path. The multiplexing device is accessible to the processor
through a second low latency path. The external device asserts an interrupt by
"pulsing" an appropriate interrupt signal to the multiplexing device. The multiplexing
device maintains a current counter for each interrupt signal and increments that
counter every time an interrupt pulse is detected. In addition to the counter,
the multiplexing device maintains a status bit for each interrupt.
