Yes, on some implementations there can be other conditions that
make a decrementer exception go away; there is no contradiction
here (thankfully). My wording was sloppy.
Some CPUs have the DEC exceptions basically edge triggered (yeah I know
for example?
it sucks). That's why, among others, the IRQ soft-disable code has code
to re-trigger DEC exceptions ASAP (by setting it to 1.. note that we
could probably use 0 here, we've been a bit conservative).
I'm not 100% certain... Paulus thinks all the old 6xx are like that, and
maybe POWER4. If I look at the oldest BookIV I can find (the 601), it
says that an exception is generated when the MSB transitions from 0 to
1. It's not clear wether the exception sticks while that bit is 1 or is
indeed considered as an "edge" event that gets cleared as soon as
delivered.
Ben.