A disclosed data processing system includes a processor and an operating system kernel that includes communication drivers to support sideband interrupt deferring of polling associated with I/O requests. The communication drivers may implement a driver stack that includes a sideband miniport driver to detect an application program read request for device data from an input/output (I/O) device. The I/O device may be a sensor or another type of human interface device. The sideband miniport driver may pend the read request and maintain an interrupt pipe of a communication transport between the host system and the I/O device in a disabled state. With the interrupt pipe disabled, the host system drivers are unable to poll the I/O device. The sideband miniport driver may pend the read request and keep the interrupt pipe disabled until a sideband interrupt is communicated to the sideband miniport driver.