Comment by adrian_b

Already since Intel 8086, x86 has the instruction "INT vector_number", whose purpose is to allow software to invoke directly any of the many kinds of exception handlers or hardware interrupt handlers that are specified by the ISA or implemented by the hardware designer, which are normally invoked when various conditions arise, as determined by software execution or by I/O events.

So you can invoke the handler of the invalid instruction exception with the INT instruction, but as another poster mentioned, the INT instruction alone is not enough for this, but you need to setup the stack in such a way so that it will contain the information expected by the exception handler, which requires multiple instructions.

This kind of invocation may be acceptable when you write a test program for the invalid instruction exception handler, but it is not acceptable when you want to initialize some guard memory with values that will trigger the exception, to signal that your program has attempted to execute instructions from an area that should not be executable. Setting a memory area as non-executable through the access rights has only page granularity, so it is not useful when a page must contain both some executable code and some non-executable data.

If Intel had not defined an official opcode that is guaranteed to remain unused forever, to be able to reliably trigger the invalid instruction exception, the workaround would have been for the user to reserve one of the 256 interrupt vectors for the invocation through software of the invalid instruction exception. For that vector, a simple handler could have been used, which would have setup the stack in the right way, before jumping to the invalid instruction handler.

But this workaround would have had the disadvantage that any chosen interrupt vector could have conflicted with some choice made by the hardware designers of some computers, so it would have been required for it to be a configurable parameter of the operating system kernel, and also of the user applications that need it, like compilers, unless it would have been standardized by some organization.

Just reserving an opcode at Intel and AMD was simpler, with no other requirements for standardization or changes in the existing software.