I never would have believed I could be in this position in 2017, but I have a target system (LPC2138) which absolutely refuses to handle interrupts, despite lots of trying on my part. For various reasons I do need to work with it, so it’s just a matter of getting on with it. The application is ‘interrupt friendly’, with several asynchronous I/O streams (SPI, UART) plus timer signals. The one thing in my favour is that the processor is very fast in comparison to my real time requirements, so I have plenty of spare grunt available. 

The approach I’m stuck with is to do the whole thing in one big polled loop, that will include 3 FIFOs to handle I/O. On a quick glance it seems viable, does anyone have any comments based on experience?

The interrupt problem is not trivial, 100% platform-compatible hello world snippets straight off the web fail to work, when they run the system crashes in a scrambled state. If there does happen to be a clear, expert fix somewhere that someone knows about, a pointer would be greatly appreciated.