Re: New vax - implementation :-)

[Anders Magnusson <ragge%tethuvudet.se@localhost>]

Hi,

Den 2021-07-03 kl. 14:50, skrev Rhialto:
> On Sat 03 Jul 2021 at 13:14:46 +0200, Anders Magnusson wrote:
> > All of these steps are (mostly) independent of each other, therefore they
> > can easily be pipelined.
> Until you get to instructions with modify a register in one operand and
> use it again in another :) such as (ok I took those examples from the
> PDP-11 architecture handbook in the section where it describes how
> different models do different things; but for a VAX you'd have to be
> careful too and with 6 operands the number of combinations is much worse)
Thought of this already :-)

The register value is modified in the ADDTO state, and at the same time 
saved in a "restore" register in case a page fault or something happens 
later on that requires rollback.  The restore register follows in the 
argument pipeline.
If two (or more) arguments uses the same register there are two ways of 
dealing with it (I haven't decided which to use yet):
- Stall the pipeline one step to catch up with the new reg value
- Have a check whether the result from the parallell pipeline uses the 
same reg and directly fetch the result.

I am leaning on the first way of doing it, since it will be quite 
uncommon, and one pipe step is cheap.
E.g. instructions like ADDL3 (r0)+,(r0)+,(r0)+ are not especially common.

>      ADD Rx,(Rx)+	; Rx gets incremented or not before being
>      ADD Rx,@-(Rx)	;   used as a source operand
>      MOV PC,offset(Rx)	; value of PC either before or after fetching
> 			;   offset from the instruction stream
>      JMP (Rx)+		; Rx gets incremented or not before being
> 			;   copied to PC
>
> and JMP is weird because it's more like a LEA arg,PC, if there were a
> Load Effective Address instruction.
I have implemented it just like any other reg-reg move instruction (or, 
actually, it's an add :-)

JMP     ab,rl#0,wl#pc        lbl=add wback

35 of the instructions use the same primitive (add).  For example; if we 
compare:

ADDL2    rl,ml        lbl=add setnz setc setv wback
INCL    ml,rl#1        lbl=add setnz setc setv wback

It's the same, but INCL has a fake 1 as second argument.

-- R