The document discusses interrupts, which occur when a process is executing on the CPU and another process requests to run. This interrupts the running process. There are three main types of interrupts: internal, external, and software interrupts. The interrupt cycle involves suspending the current process, saving its context, running the interrupt handler, restoring context, and continuing the original process. Interrupts are prioritized, with hardware commands having the highest priority and I/O devices the lowest. This priority scheme allows more important interrupts to preempt lower priority ones.