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Definition of Privileged Instructions

By David Bolton, About.com

Definition: The CPU of most processors manufactured in the last 15 years have some special instructions which are very powerful. These Privileged Instructions are kept for Operating System Kernel applications and are not able to be used by user written programs.

This restricts the damage that a user written program can inflict upon the system and cuts down the number of times that the system actually crashes.

Glossary:

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