Editing Motorola 68000 (section)

===Privilege levels===
The CPU, and later the whole family, implements two levels of privilege. User mode gives access to everything except privileged instructions such as interrupt level controls.<ref name=":0">{{cite book |year=1993 |url=https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/MC68000UM.pdf |title=M68000 8-/16-/32-Bit Microprocessors User's Manual Ninth Edition |publisher=Motorola |at=p. 6-2 |access-date=February 28, 2022 |archive-date=April 14, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220414231314/https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/MC68000UM.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref> Supervisor privilege gives access to everything. An interrupt always becomes supervisory. The supervisor bit is stored in the status register, and is visible to user programs.<ref name=":0" />

An advantage of this system is that the supervisor level has a separate stack pointer. This permits a [[computer multitasking|multitasking]] system to use very small stacks for tasks, because the designers do not have to allocate the memory required to hold the stack frames of a maximum stack-up of interrupts.