ABNORMALITY DETECTING METHOD FOR MAIN PROCESSOR AND FIRMWARE RUNAWAY PREVENTING METHOD FOR I/O PROCESSOR

PURPOSE:To realize a method to prevent the runaway of an I/O processor by providing plural I/O processors separately from a main processor and surely detecting the abnormality of the main processor in an abnormality preventing method for communication equipment which performs communication line control by firmware. CONSTITUTION:The communication equipment consisting of the main processor 100 and a communication adaptor 200 is constituted so as to detect the abnormality of the main processor 100 by providing a decision means 240 which decides whether or not data transfer between buffer memory 230 in the communication adaptor 200 and main memory 120 in the main processor 100 can be performed, and deciding whether or not direct memory access between the buffer memory 230 and the main memory 120 can be performed by the decision means 240 when the transfer of data between the communication adaptor 230 and a counter device 300 is performed.