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For example, hardware timers send interrupts to the CPU at regular intervals. Most operating systems execute a HLT instruction when there is no immediate work to be done, putting the processor into an idle state. In Windows NT, for example, this instruction is run in the "System Idle Process". On x86 processors, the opcode of HLT is 0xF4.
The term can also refer to the condition a computer running such a workload is in, in which its processor utilization is high, perhaps at 100% usage for many seconds or minutes, and interrupts generated by peripherals may be processed slowly or be indefinitely delayed. [citation needed]
BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction - the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden ...
Generally, the channel controllers would do their best to run all of the bus operations internally, moving data when the CPU was known to be busy elsewhere if possible, and only using interrupts when necessary. This greatly reduced CPU load, and provided better overall system performance. Single system bus
Many families of microcontrollers and embedded processors have multiple register banks to allow quick context switching for interrupts. Such schemes can be considered a type of block multithreading among the user program thread and the interrupt threads. [citation needed]
This IDE, which Parallax names The Propeller tool, is intended for use under a Microsoft Windows operating system. The Spin language is a high-level programming language. Because it is interpreted in software, it runs slower than pure Propeller assembly, but can be more space-efficient: Propeller assembly opcodes are 32 bits long; Spin ...
IBM System/360 Model 50 operator's console and CPU; the operator's console is a terminal used by the operating system to communicate with the operator. The first computers in the late 1940s and 1950s were directly programmed either with plugboards or with machine code inputted on media such as punch cards , without programming languages or ...
The 8259 combines multiple interrupt input sources into a single interrupt output to the host microprocessor, extending the interrupt levels available in a system beyond the one or two levels found on the processor chip. The 8259A was the interrupt controller for the ISA bus in the original IBM PC and IBM PC AT.