6.1 Why Protection?

The purpose of the protection features of the 80386 is to help detect and identify bugs. The 80386 supports sophisticated applications that may consist of hundreds or thousands of program modules. In such applications, the question is how bugs can be found and eliminated as quickly as possible and how their damage can be tightly confined. To help debug applications faster and make them more robust in production, the 80386 contains mechanisms to verify memory accesses and instruction execution for conformance to protection criteria. These mechanisms may be used or ignored, according to system design objectives.

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