Discuss the role of a bus arbiter in a multiprocessor configuration.

Bus arbiter: It functions to resolve priority among bus masters and permits only one device at a time to access the shared bus. This 8289 bus arbiter controls the interface of a bus master to a shared bus. It is designed to function along with the 8086/8088 microprocessors. All bus master or microprocessor needs an arbiter for the interface to the shared bus that Intel calls the MULTIBUS and IBM calls the MICRO CHANNEL.

The shared bus utilized only to pass information from one microprocessor to the other; otherwise, the bus master functions in their own local bus modes using their own local memory, programs and I/O space. Microprocessors are connected in this type of system are often termed as parallel or distributed processors since they can execute software and perform tasks in parallel.