Technical Reference Guide
Compaq Deskpro EXS and Workstation 300 Personal Computers
Featuring the Intel Pentium 4 Processor
First Edition - December 2000
4-15
4.4 SYSTEM RESOURCES
This section describes the availability and basic control of major subsystems, otherwise known as
resource allocation or simply “system resources.” System resources are provided on a priority
basis through hardware interrupts and DMA requests and grants.
4.4.1 INTERRUPTS
The microprocessor uses two types of hardware interrupts; maskable and nonmaskable. A
maskable interrupt can be enabled or disabled within the microprocessor by the use of the STI and
CLI instructions. A nonmaskable interrupt cannot be masked off within the microprocessor,
although it may be inhibited by hardware or software means external to the microp rocessor.
4.4.1.1 Maskable Interrupts
The maskable interrupt is a hardware-generated signal used by peripheral functions within the
system to get the attention of the microprocessor. Peripheral functions produce a unique INTA-H
(PCI) or IRQ0-15 (ISA) signal that is routed to interrupt processing logic that asserts the interrupt
(INTR-) input to the microprocessor. The microprocessor halts execution to determine the source
of the interrupt and then services the peripheral as appropriate. Figure 4-9 shows the routing of
PCI and ISA interrupts. Most IRQs are routed through the I/O controller, which contains a
serializing function. A serialized interrupt stream is applied to the 82801 ICH.
Figure 4-9. Maskable Interrupt Processing, Block Diagram
The 82801 ICH2 component can be configured (through the Setup utility) to handle interrupts in
one of two modes of operation:
8259 mode
APIC mode
82801
ICH2
Interrupt
Processing
Serial IRQ
IRQ14,15
INTA-..D-
IRQ3..7,
9..12,
14,15
IDE
Hard Drives INTR-
Microprocessor
I/O &
SM Functions
PCI Peripherals
I/O Controller
Interrupt
Serializer
APIC Bus