LM3S308 Datasheet, PDF (73/537 Pages) Texas Instruments – ARM and Thumb are registered trademarks and Cortex is a trademark

Stellaris^® LM3S308 Microcontroller
2.5.7.1
handling a late-arriving exception. The processor pops the stack and restores the processor
state to the state it had before the interrupt occurred. See “Exception Return” on page 74 for
more information.
■ Tail-Chaining. This mechanism speeds up exception servicing. On completion of an exception
handler, if there is a pending exception that meets the requirements for exception entry, the
stack pop is skipped and control transfers to the new exception handler.
■ Late-Arriving. This mechanism speeds up preemption. If a higher priority exception occurs
during state saving for a previous exception, the processor switches to handle the higher priority
exception and initiates the vector fetch for that exception. State saving is not affected by late
arrival because the state saved is the same for both exceptions. Therefore, the state saving
continues uninterrupted. The processor can accept a late arriving exception until the first instruction
of the exception handler of the original exception enters the execute stage of the processor. On
return from the exception handler of the late-arriving exception, the normal tail-chaining rules
apply.
Exception Entry
Exception entry occurs when there is a pending exception with sufficient priority and either the
processor is in Thread mode or the new exception is of higher priority than the exception being
handled, in which case the new exception preempts the original exception.
When one exception preempts another, the exceptions are nested.
Sufficient priority means the exception has more priority than any limits set by the mask registers
(see PRIMASK on page 55, FAULTMASK on page 56, and BASEPRI on page 57). An exception
with less priority than this is pending but is not handled by the processor.
When the processor takes an exception, unless the exception is a tail-chained or a late-arriving
exception, the processor pushes information onto the current stack. This operation is referred to as
stacking and the structure of eight data words is referred to as stack frame.
Figure 2-7. Exception Stack Frame
...
{aligner}
xPSR
PC
LR
R12
R3
R2
R1
R0
Pre-IRQ top of stack
IRQ top of stack
Immediately after stacking, the stack pointer indicates the lowest address in the stack frame. Unless
stack alignment is disabled, the stack frame is aligned to a double-word address. If the STKALIGN
bit of the Configuration Control (CCR) register is set, stack align adjustment is performed during
stacking.
The stack frame includes the return address, which is the address of the next instruction in the
interrupted program. This value is restored to the PC at exception return so that the interrupted
program resumes.
June 18, 2012
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