Lib.rs

x86 only Abstractions for the 8259 and 8259A interrupt controllers, credit to Eric Kidd git@randomhacks.net and Phil Opperman

lib.rs:

Support for the 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller, which handles basic I/O interrupts. In multicore mode, we would apparently need to replace this with an APIC interface.

The basic idea here is that we have two PIC chips, PIC1 and PIC2, and that PIC2 is slaved to interrupt 2 on PIC 1. You can find the whole story at http://wiki.osdev.org/PIC (as usual). Basically, our immensely sophisticated modern chipset is engaging in early-80s cosplay, and our goal is to do the bare minimum required to get reasonable interrupts.

The most important thing we need to do here is set the base "offset" for each of our two PICs, because by default, PIC1 has an offset of 0x8, which means that the I/O interrupts from PIC1 will overlap processor interrupts for things like "General Protection Fault". Since interrupts 0x00 through 0x1F are reserved by the processor, we move the PIC1 interrupts to 0x20-0x27 and the PIC2 interrupts to 0x28-0x2F. If we wanted to write a DOS emulator, we'd presumably need to choose different base interrupts, because DOS used interrupt 0x21 for system calls.