A
general protection fault (
GPF) in the
Intel x86 and
AMD x86-64 types of computer
microprocessor architectures, and other unrelated architectures, is a
fault (a type of
interrupt) that can encompass several cases in which protection mechanisms within the
processor architecture are violated by any of the programs that are running, either the
kernel or a user program. The mechanism is first described in section 9.8.13 in the Intel 80386 programmer's reference manual from 1986. A general protection fault is implemented as an
interrupt (
vector number 13 in
decimal) in both
x86 and
AMD64 architectures.