Interrupts

Question 1

interrupts

Answer 1

Signals generated by software and harware indicating to the processor that a process needs attention.

Question 2

Priorities

Answer 2

Interrupts have different priorites and levels of importance at which they should be processed by the CPU

Question 3

Priority queue

Answer 3

A queue of diferent interrupts, the high priority processes are a tthe front and low priority towards the back

Question 4

Interrupt register

Answer 4

Stores the priority queue, a hardware chip that generates the interrupt signals that send to the CPU to stop its current task and act.

Question 5

Interrupt service routine

Answer 5

At the end of a FDE cycle, the processor checks the contents of the interrupt register, if there is an interrupt of a higher priority than a process being executed - contents in the special purpose registers are put into a stack - the processor responds to the interrupt by putting it in RAM - A flag is set to signal the ISR has begun - once the interrupt is serviced, the flag is reset - interrupt queue is checked for any more interrupts with higher priority to the original process - if not, contents of the stack are replaced and the FDE cycle resumes.

Question 6

stack

Answer 6

A place where current data being processed is temporarily placed in when a more important process is to be processed