A closer look at Arm A-profile support for non-maskable interrupts

A long-standing limitation of the Arm A-profile architecture has been the lack of support for non-maskable interrupts (NMIs). However, as announced in Arm A-Profile Architecture Developments 2021 Arm is adding support in both the CPU and Generic Interrupt Controller (GIC) architecture for NMIs. But what exactly is an NMI, how does operating systems software use these features, and why are they called non-maskable when there are several ways to mask them? This blog post explores these questions in more detail.

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