A task is hardware architected thread of execution. The INTEL architecture allows for multiple independent tasks to co-exit and provides the task gate mechanism as a means of switching between tasks. Tasks are represented to the hardware by the TSS.

The characteristics of a task are very similar to that of the OS/2 process. Protect-mode processes however, tend to run under a single task in OS/2 and implement switching through the more efficient software managed context switching mechanism.

Only VDMs and error recovery processes run as independent tasks.

See the INTEL486 Programmer's Reference for more information.

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