Interrupt Priorities
The 8051 offers two levels of interrupt priority: high and low. By using interrupt priorities it may assign higher priority to certain interrupt conditions.
For example, you may have enabled Timer 1 Interrupt which is automatically called every time Timer 1 overflows. Additionally, you may have enabled the Serial Interrupt which is called every time a character is received via the serial port. However, you may consider that receiving a character is much more important than the timer interrupt. In this case, if Timer 1 Interrupt is already executing then it may wish that the serial interrupt itself interrupts the Timer 1 Interrupt. When the serial interrupt is complete, control passes back to Timer 1 Interrupt and finally back to the main program. This may accomplish this by assigning a high priority to the Serial Interrupt and a low priority to the Timer 1 Interrupt.
When considering interrupt priorities, the following rules apply : -
1. Nothing can interrupt a high-priority interrupt--not even another high priority interrupt.
2. A high-priority interrupt may interrupt a low-priority interrupt.
3. A low-priority interrupt may only occur if no other interrupt is already executing.
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