alt Hacker NewsI'm not much of an x86 person but on other architectures you can raise software interrupts/exceptions. Does x86 not have this or did those facilities not cover enough use cases?
Replies
js8 • today at 3:25 PM
It's basically a convention. The alternative is to raise interrupts of course, but that might be application specific, or use other invalid instructions than the designated one, but they might work differently on other processor types.
349ru3h4f03 • today at 3:22 PM
x86 has...
INT Ib INT1 INT3 INTO BOUND
Maybe because if the code wants to call the invalid opcode interrupt handler (INT6), it needs extra code to populate the flags and registers expected by that handler, whereas actually triggering an invalid opcode exception will get all those parameters populated automatically.