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Stores the current FPU state (operating environment and register stack) at the specified destination in memory, and then re-initializes the FPU. The FSAVE instruction checks for and handles pending unmasked floating-point exceptions before storing the FPU state; the FNSAVE instruction does not.
The FPU operating environment consists of the FPU control word, status word, tag word, instruction pointer, data pointer, and last opcode. Figures 8-9 through 8-12 in the IA-32 Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 1, show the layout in memory of the stored environment, depending on the operating mode of the processor (protected or real) and the current operand-size attribute (16-bit or 32-bit). In virtual-8086 mode, the real mode layouts are used. The contents of the FPU register stack are stored in the 80 bytes immediately follow the operating environment image.
The saved image reflects the state of the FPU after all floating-point instructions preceding the FSAVE/FNSAVE instruction in the instruction stream have been executed.
After the FPU state has been saved, the FPU is reset to the same default values it is set to with the FINIT/FNINIT instructions (see "FINIT/FNINIT-Initialize Floating-Point Unit" in this chapter).
The FSAVE/FNSAVE instructions are typically used when the operating system needs to perform a context switch, an exception handler needs to use the FPU, or an application program needs to pass a "clean" FPU to a procedure.
The assembler issues two instructions for the FSAVE instruction (an FWAIT instruction followed by an FNSAVE instruction), and the processor executes each of these instructions separately. If an exception is generated for either of these instructions, the save EIP points to the instruction that caused the exception.
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