Article View: comp.arch
Article #10993Re: branch-and-link
From: Dan Swartzendruber
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 04:49
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 04:49
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On a related note (vis-a-vis debugging ease) to the branch-and-link issue, another peeve I've always had is that no commercially available processors (that I know of) make NULL pointer detection easy withou serious run-time overhead. Various OS's try by unmapping the first N pages of memory, which works fine until you run into a chip like the 68030, which supports huge displacements. Not to mention if the index register pushes the effective address out of your protected window, you're hosed. If you have a standard base_reg+index_reg+disp format, it would seem to me that having the processor check the base register for NULL and faulting if it is wouldn't be that hard (or inefficient). Especially if NULL happens to be zero on that machine. -- #include <std_disclaimer.h> Dan S.
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!news.gtech.com!noc.near.net!transfer.stratus.com!sw.stratus.com!dswartz From: dswartz@sw.stratus.com (Dan Swartzendruber) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: branch-and-link Date: 28 Dec 1992 04:49:40 GMT Organization: Stratus Computer, Inc. Lines: 15 Distribution: world Message-ID: <1hm114INN6v2@transfer.stratus.com> References: <1hkqk3INNsns@transfer.stratus.com> <1hlll9INNe0s@uwm.edu> <1hm0cpINN8nf@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: redondo.sw.stratus.com