What is DMA? Context Switching

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DMA stands for Direct Memory Access, a feature that allows hardware devices to transfer data to/from memory without involving the CPU.

DMA is used to offload data transfer tasks from the CPU, improving overall system performance.
Context switching is the process of saving and restoring the state of a CPU so that multiple processes can share the same CPU.
DMA and context switching are both important concepts in embedded systems design.
Example: In a system with a network interface card, DMA can be used to transfer incoming data directly to memory without CPU intervention.
Example: During context switching, the CPU saves the current process state and loads the state of the next process to be executed.

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