Program status word

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In computers, the program status word (PSW) is an area of memory or a hardware register which contains information about program state used by the operating system and the underlying hardware. It will normally include a pointer (address) to the next instruction to be executed. The program status word typically contains an error status field and condition codes such as the interrupt enable/disable bit and a supervisor/user mode bit.

See also: Status register – a strictly hardware-based type of PSW