General Protection Fault - Technical Causes For Faults

Technical Causes For Faults

General protection faults are raised by the processor when a protected instruction is encountered which exceeds the permission level of the currently executing task - either because a user-mode program is attempting a protected instruction, or because the operating system has issued a request which would put the processor into an undefined state.

General protection faults are caught and handled by modern operating systems. Generally, if the fault originated in a user-mode program, the user-mode program is terminated. If, however, the fault originated in a core system driver or the operating system itself, the operating system usually saves diagnostic information either to a file or to the screen, and then either causes a blue screen of death or restarts the computer.

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