The signals in this group are available for various types of system control; most of these have an immediate or near immediate effect on expansion cards and/or the system CPU itself. Hardware Bus Error/Interrupt (/BERR) This is a general indicator of a bus fault or special condition of some kind. Any expansion card capable of detecting a hardware error relating directly to that card can assert /BERR when that bus error condition is detected, especially any sort of harmful hardware error condition. This signal is the strongest possible indicator of a bad situation, as it causes all PICs to get off the bus, and will usually generate a level 2 exception on the host CPU. For any condition that can be handled in software and doesn't pose an immediate threat to hardware, notification via a standard processor interrupt is the better choice. The bus controller will drive /BERR in the event of a detected bus collision or DMA error (an attempt by a bus master to access local bus resources it doesn't have valid access permission for). All cards must monitor /BERR and be prepared to tri-state all of their on-bus output buffers whenever this signal is asserted. An expansion bus master will attempt to retry a cycle aborted by a single /BERR and notify system software in the case of two subsequent /BERR results. Since any number of devices may assert /BERR, and all bus cards must monitor it, any device that drives /BERR must drive with an open collector or similar device, and any device that monitors /BERR should place a minimal load on it. This signal is pulled high by a passive backplane resistor. Note that, especially for the slave device being addressed, that /BERR alone is not always necessarily an indication of a bus failure in the pure sense, but may indicate some other kind of unusual condition. Therefore, a device should still respond to the bus address, if otherwise appropriate, when a /BERR condition is indicated. It simply tri-states is bus buffers and other outputs, and waits for a change in the bus state. If the /BERR signal is negated with the cycle unterminated, the special condition has been resolved and the slave responds to the rest of the cycle as it normally would have. If the cycle is terminated by the bus master, the resolution of the special condition has indicated that the addressed slave is not needed, and so the cycle terminates without the slave being used. System Reset (/RESET, /IORST) The bus supplies two versions of the system reset signal. The /RESET signal is bi-directional and unbuffered, allowing an expansion card to hard reset the system. It should only be used by boards that need this reset capability, and is driven only by an open collector or similar device. The /IORST signal is a buffered output-only version of the reset signal that should be used as the normal reset input to boards not concerned with resetting the system on their own. All expansion devices are required to reset their autoconfiguration logic when /IORST is asserted. These signals are pulled high by passive backplane resistors. System Halt (/HLT) This signal is driven, along with /RESET, to assert a full-system reset. A full-system reset is asserted on a powerup reset or a keyboard reset; any PIC that needs to differentiate between full system and I/O reset should monitor /HLT and /IORST unless it also needs to drive a reset condition. This is driven with an open-collector output, or the equivalent, and pulled up by a backplane resistor. System Interrupts Two of the decoded, level-sensitive 680x0 interrupt inputs are available on the expansion bus, and these are labeled as /INT2 and /INT6. Each of these interrupt lines is shared by wired ORing, thus each line must be driven by an open-collector or equivalent output type. Zorro III interrupts can be handled Zorro II style, via autovectors and daisy-chained polling, or they can be vectored using the quick interrupt protocol described in the bus architecture section. Zorro II and Zorro III systems originally provided /INT1, /INT4, /INT5, and /INT7 lines as well, but as these were never properly supportable by system software, they have been eliminated. Those lines are considered reserved for future use in a Zorro III system.