The Perils of NMI The Perils of NMI NMI is a critical resource, yet all too often it's misused. Return to articles list Return to TGG's home page Please subscribe to The Embedded Muse , a free biweekly e- newsletter with hints, ideas and rambles about firmware and hardware in embedded systems. No advertising, just down to earth embedded talk. Zip or Country Email Wise amateurs fear interrupts.
Fools go where wise men fear to tread.
Normal sequential code is hard enough to understand, code, and debug. Toss in a handful of asyncronous events that randomly change the processor's execution path, perhaps thousands of times per second, and you have a recipe for disaster. Yet interrupts are an important fact of life for all real time systems. In fact, interrupts are the both the best and worse microprocessor feature. Well thought out interrupt-driven code will be reasonably easy to write, debug and maintain.