this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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Can someone smarter than me explain what mov rax, rbx. Does it read keyboard input?
It moves the value of register (a CPU memory cell) rbx to register rax. It's not that important though.
Basically the comic shows that the CPU is happily chugging along, executing instructions when suddenly the keyboard sends an interrupt telling the CPU it must stop all work and listen to whatever it has to say.
That was how keyboards worked before USB (back when they used PS/2 or DIN connectors). With USB it's the other way around: the device gets polled X times per second to check of it has any data to send.
Iirc the south bridge now aggregates masked interrupts and groups them together instead of pestering the CPU a whole bunch
It's irrelevant to the humor, it's just an arbitrary x86 instruction. The point is that keyboard inputs (with a PS/2 keyboard) interrupt whatever the computer is doing
Though to answer your question, it moves the value from the rbx register to the rbx register
Oh ok, I didn't know keyboards used to do that
These are some assembly instructions that the computer is happily running with no keyboard input. The keyboard input is then coming in as an interrupt demanding immediate processing which is silencing the poor background bird process.