Re: VAX RPB (Restart Parameter Block)

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>>    cons_A_TX: blbc    1001(r11),0x20044f32
> That 1001(r11) is my question to be exact.

I think I said elsewhere in this thread - the longword whose low bit is
being tested is at r11 + 1001 (since the disassembly came from my
disassembler, I can fairly confidently say the 1001 is in hex).  So if
the bit is in ffea01, r11 would have to hold ffda00.

> T hink, the 1001 is a signed 32bit value that just adresses the 0x1
> bit in the longword (r11) points to, is that correct?

No.  The 1001 is a signed 16-bit value - it could be 32-bit instead,
but I think it would have been disassembled as 00001001 in that case -
which is added to what's in r11.  The sum is the address of the
operand.  As for which bit is used, the blbc instruction always uses
the least-significant bit; if you need to test some other bit, you need
to use a different instruction (such as bbc, or cmpv plus an ordinary
conditional branch).  (There's also a similar addressing mode that uses
an 8-bit offset, but 1001 can't fit in 8 bits.)

> (in sum I wonder about alignment und such things..)

The VAX is extremely forgiving of alignment "errors"; in general, any
datatype can be accessed at any address.  (Some implementations impose
a substantial speed penalty for misaligned data, but that's a
performance issue, not a correctness issue.)  It is, however,
byte-addressed; it can access things on arbitrary bit boundaries, but
you have to use the bitfield instructions (insv, extv, etc), which take
a memory (byte) address and then a bit offset relative to that.

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