äHardware interrupts are
used to handle communication to/from peripheral devices
äHardware interrupt occurs
when an external device sends a signal to the 8088’s interrupt request line
along with an interrupt number n on the 8088 data lines. The 8088 then:
ä1. Stops whatever is being done
ä2. Jumps to a subroutine n
to handle the data going to/from the device
ä3. Returns to whatever was being done
äSoftware interrupts
äCan be used to test the
implementation of the interrupt handling routines
äInterrupt table approach
is useful because
äIndirection given by the
interrupt vector means we only need to specify the address of the routine in
the vector,
can reference the routine using n
äCan lead to problems if 2
devices expect to use same n