Jolitz Heritage Jolitz Heritage Site - Chronicling the Legacies of the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley, including the accomplishments of William Jolitz, Lynne Jolitz, Rebecca Jolitz, Ben Jolitz, and William Leonard Jolitz. [ Jolitz Heritage ]

Have an opinion? Want/need more? Ask.

Other Processor Faults

Other Processor Faults Along with address space faults, we found we must map 15 other faults (see Figure 7) into the Berkeley UNIX kernel exception-handling mechanisms. The numeric coprocessor presents special fault-handling challenges, for it can be operating when 386BSD switches to another unrelated process. In that case, we can get a trap that should have been passed to a process other than the one currently running. If 386BSD receives an unexpected fault while running in the kernel, it must immediately force the kernel down (in UNIX vernacular, to "panic") and attempt to save as much state information as possible for diagnostic purposes. Thus, we differentiated user traps from kernel traps. In most other microprocessors, a bit in the processor flags or status word determines if we are running in the kernel, but the 386 offers no such bit. So, 386BSD examines the contents of the CS segment register when a trap occurs (this is saved by the hardware during an exception) to determine if an instruction was executing in user mode. Copyright©1994 Willaim & Lynne Jolitz