The generic interrupt handling layer is designed to provide a complete abstraction of interrupt handling for device drivers. It is able to handle all the different types of interrupt controller hardware. Device drivers use generic API functions to request, enable, disable and free interrupts. The drivers do not have to know anything about interrupt hardware details, so they can be used on different platforms without code changes.

This documentation is provided to developers who want to implement an interrupt subsystem based for their architecture, with the help of the generic IRQ handling layer.