Re: Questions

[Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai <asmodai@xxxxxx>]

-On [20050112 18:12], Zera William Holladay (zholla1@xxxxxxx) wrote:
>1.  What is the diff between a "trap" and an "interrupt?"  The distinction
>between the two seems blurred at best.

An interrupt is where peripheral devices signal the CPU that data is ready
to be moved to/from memory from/to the device.  The CPU interrupts its
current process scheduling to handle IO.  That explains also why on a LAN
that has a lot of excessive broadcasting traffic a simple NIC can slow down
the entire computer.

I think the trap should be exception.  And those are internal states the CPU
triggers for itself: division by zero, breakpoints, overflow, page fault,
and so on.

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono
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