Andrew S. Tanenbaum (OS) Edition 4 Exercise 2 Question 2 (Page No. 174)

Question

Suppose that you were to design an advanced computer architecture that did process switching in hardware, instead of having interrupts. What information would the CPU need? Describe how the hardware process switching might work.

Answer 1

We can have one register which contains the pointer to the currently running process-table entry. On the completion of the I/O, the CPU will store the present machine state in the presently executing process-table entry.  After this, it will jump to the interrupt vector and get a pointer to other process-table entry. Then this process will get started.

So, this is how the hardware process switching might work.