Vol. 3A 5-11
INTERRUPT AND EXCEPTION HANDLING
While priority among these classes listed in Table 5-2 is consistent throughout the architecture,exceptions within each class are implementation-dependent and may vary from processor toprocessor. The processor first services a pending exception or interrupt from the class which hasthe highest priority, transferring execution to the first instruction of the handler. Lower priorityexceptions are discarded; lower priority interrupts are held pending. Discarded exceptions are

Table 5-2. Priority Among Simultaneous Exceptions and Interrupts

Priority Description
1 (Highest) Hardware Reset and Machine Checks
- RESET
- Machine Check
2 Trap on Task Switch
- T flag in TSS is set
3 External Hardware Interventions
- FLUSH
- STOPCLK
- SMI
- INIT
4 Traps on the Previous Instruction
- Breakpoints
- Debug Trap Exceptions (TF flag set or data/I-O breakpoint)
5 Nonmaskable Interrupts (NMI) 1
6 Maskable Hardware Interrupts 1
7 Code Breakpoint Fault
8 Faults from Fetching Next Instruction
- Code-Segment Limit Violation
- Code Page Fault
9 Faults from Decoding the Next Instruction
- Instruction length > 15 bytes
- Invalid Opcode
- Coprocessor Not Available
10 (Lowest) Faults on Executing an Instruction
- Overflow
- Bound error
- Invalid TSS
- Segment Not Present
- Stack fault
- General Protection
- Data Page Fault
- Alignment Check
- x87 FPU Floating-point exception
- SIMD floating-point exception
NOTE:
1. The Intel486TM processor and earlier processors group nonmaskable and maskable interrupts in the
same priority class.