-On [20050112 18:12], Zera William Holladay (zholla1@uic.edu) 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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