This project is dedicated to the memory of William Morris (aka Frags), who was the main contributor to the bounty but was unable to see the final result.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Address Unknown

Finally all the normal addressing modes are done in this update. As I mentioned in the previous post: the final missing pieces were the 68020 (complex) addressing modes.
This took me lot longer than I expected. Not just because these addressing modes are complicated, but also because memory reading is involved.

Secretly I hoped that this will fix the issue with the OS, but no. I am not sure why I expected that. :P
The OS still behaves the same: reboot loop.

You can stop reading now, technical details will follow.

Why does memory access make everything much more complicated?

The answer is: every memory access has to go through the memory handling functions in the emulator. I already implemented the possibility of direct memory access, but we cannot depend on that every time (or rather most of the time).

Then why is that causing any headaches? Because the functions are outside of the translated code, coded in C and all assigned temporary registers will be gone.

Previously, for the MOVE instructions I workarounded the situation by remapping and reloading only the required temporary registers as soon as the memory operation was done. This approach is simply not working in the case of the addressing mode translation: the addressing modes are completely isolated subroutines, do not know any details of the already allocated and mapped registers (that should be restored).

For now I implemented a different workaround for the addressing modes, which is far less optimal: instead of dropping all the temporary registers, I save them on the stack then restore it when the execution returns to the translated code.

No need to say how much slower this is: saving and reloading all mapped temporary registers than dealing with the absolutely required registers only. I am not satisfied with this solution, but at least it is working. Unless the called function expects a proper stackframe, because there won't be any. (At least this is not the case for OS4, and most likely not for MorphOS either.) This solution is not strictly compatible with the SysV ABI.

Probably it would make more sense to store the temporary registers in the static context structure, there is no need to be reentrant: there are no call backs to the translated code. Maybe I can revisit this whole piece of code at a later stage.

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