Assembly code questioon.

mynet43

I spent some time debugging assembly code.

I ran into a bug I hadn't seen before, that took me way too long to find.

If I use the following code:

        wrlong  cnt,_addr

It assembles fine, but doesn't store 'cnt' in _addr.

If I change it like this:

        mov     t2,cnt          
        wrlong  t2,_addr           

It now works fine.

Has anyone run across this before?

On p. 397 of the manual, it says that read-only registers can only be used in the 'source' field, which this is.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for the help.

Jim

mpark

In "wrlong cnt,_addr", cnt is in the "destination" field (i.e., bits 17-9 of the instruction). "Source" and "destination" in this context do not necessarily refer to the direction of data movement.

mynet43

Thanks! Great answer. You're absolutely right!

Too bad the assembler doesn't catch it...

Paul Baker

How would it catch it? The assembler has no idea if an address or data is in any particular register.

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Paul Baker

Mike Green

Another reason to not prohibit it is that there are memory locations "underneath" the hardware read-only registers. If you use one of these locations in the destination field of an instruction, you are accessing the underlying memory location which can occasionally be used to store data or instructions.

MagIO2

Hi Mike,

do you say that with

mov cnt, # some value
wrlong cnt, addr

you really find 'some value' in HUB RAM? And this works with other special registers as well. Nice to know if that works because it can safe some longs in PASM.

So, what about

mov cnt, cnt
wrlong cnt, addr

then you don't have to waste an additional register.

mynet43

Considering the time I spent trying to find the 'bug', it seems like there should be a better way.

I'm surprised the assembler has no knowledge of the props special registers. It seems like it would be helpful if it did.

Since it executed without an error, does anyone know which data was actually written to the output address?

It seems like it would make more sense to provide another way to get at the "registers under the registers".

All-in-all, I learned a lot from this little post.

Thanks everyone,

Jim

Mike Green

The "shadow RAM" trick only works with read-only registers. One of the video drivers that Chip wrote uses this technique to squeeze out a couple of extra locations. There have been a couple of other uses of these locations for instructions since the hardware fetches instructions from RAM, not the hardware registers.