interrup.pri

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                     iAPX 86 Interrupt Primer
                     ------------------------

                          by Ralf Brown
                              12/87



What is an interrupt?
   An interrupt is a hardware signal that tells the CPU to 
   temporarily stop what it is doing and go do something else.  
   Without interrupts, the CPU would have to constantly check for 
   external events; with interrupts, the CPU can work on 
   something else and still respond to an event as soon as it 
   occurs.

   CPUs typically have an instruction to disable interrupts for 
   use when a section of code has to run without being disturbed 
   by external events.  Because of this, most CPUs also have a 
   special interrupt called a Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI), which 
   is responded to even when all other interrupts are disabled.  
   The NMI is used to signal calamities such as memory failure or 
   imminent power loss.

Why so many different interrupts?
   The 8086 family of processors has the ability to recognize 256 
   different interrupts.  They also have the ability to let a 
   program invoke any of these interrupts with a special 
   instruction, known as a software interrupt (as opposed to a 
   hardware interrupt which is signalled from outside the 
   processor).  Software interrupts are treated just like 
   hardware interrupts, except that they are never disabled and 
   do not result in an acknowledgement to other chips in the 
   computer.

   Since a program can invoke an interrupt by number rather than 
   by its address (as it has to call subroutines), interrupts are 
   a convenient way of providing services without having to 
   recompile a program whenever the address of the code providing 
   the service changes.  This also allows a user program to 
   enhance the services provided by directing the interrupt to 
   itself.

How does an interrupt work?
   The 8086 reserves the lowest 1024 bytes of memory for a table 
   containing the addresses for each of the 256 possible 
   interrupts.  When an interrupt occurs (hardware or software), 
   the processor multiplies its number by 4 and looks at the 
   resulting memory location to find the address of the piece of 
   code which handles the interrupt.  It then places the current 
   address in the program and the processor flags on the stack, 
   and jumps to the beginning of the interrupt handler.

   When the interrupt handler finishes, it invokes a special 
   instruction to return from the interrupt.  This instruction 
   takes the previously saved flags and program address off of 
   the stack and places them back in the appropriate registers in 
   the CPU.

   The interrupt handler has to be careful to preserve any 
   registers that it uses which are not used to communicate 
   results to the program that invoked the interrupt.  If the 
   interrupt can be triggered by a hardware interrupt (only 
   certain ones can on IBM PC's, XT's, and AT's), then the 
   interrupt handler has to preserve ALL registers, since the 
   interrupt could have happened anywhere.