Difference between harware interrupt and internal interrupt?

Answer 1

A hardware interrupt is initiated from a hardware event, such as a byte received from a serial port. It is asynchronous to the running program, i.e. it can occur at any time.

An internal, or software, interrupt is initiated by the running program, thus it is under the control of the running program. In the 8085, for instance, the RST instructions are software interrupts. Note, however, that external interrupts can initiate a software RST instruction, so the two events can appear to be the same kind of event.

The biggest difference is the handling of the interrupt enable (IE) flag. In the hardware interrupt, the IE flag is turned off when processing the interrupt, and it is turned on right before the interrupt service routine executes the final return instruction. The software interrupt, on the other hand, has nothing to do with IE. As a result, the code must be able to tell the difference.