Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Explain in detail about software interrupt.



Software interrupt is initiated by executing an instruction. It is a special call instruction that behaves like an interrupt rather than a subroutine call. The most common use of software interrupt is associated with a supervisor (or kernel) call instruction. This instruction provides a medium for the user program to switch from user mode to kernel mode by generating a software interrupt. Whenever a software interrupt is generated it changes the mode of the program and the control cannot be transferred to the arbitrary address. Computers often generate the software interrupt to communicate with the disk controller to request data be read or write from or to disk.

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