Interrupt

An interrupt is something which alters the regular flow of control of the program. It needs to be processed by some code which lies out of the original program, and is unexpected / rare from the program's point of view.

Causes

Asynchronous / External

• An IO device sends a signal
• Timer interruption
• Power disruption or any other hardware failure

Synchronous / Internal

• An undefined opcode
• Arithmetic overflow / FPU exception
• Virtual memory exception
• Software / syscall exception