From owner-pc532%daver@mips.com Fri Apr 27 14:43:58 1990
X-Path: hplwbc.hpl.hp.com!culberts
From: Bruce Culbertson <culberts@hplwbc.hpl.hp.com>
To: pc532@hplwbc.hpl.hp.com
Subject: Monitor Sources 0 of 3
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 90 09:55:16 pdt
Reply-To: pc532@bungi.com
Precedence: bulk

Here are the latest monitor sources.  There is one essential new
feature (direct-exception) plus several non-essential new features.
See the LOG file for specifics.

Direct-exception mode gives much lower interrupt latency while
sacrificing the external addressing mode.  To my way of thinking, this
is a good trade-off because it is hard to do much with the external
addressing mode in a Unix environment.  It is not hard to dream up
alternatives to external addressing which do not have the severe
performance impact.  The monitor's debug features will not work
unless the monitor and the code being debugged run with the same
exception mode.  Clever code could probably be written which would
change the exception mode, modify the interrupt table, and build a
module table, so that the monitor could continue to be used in the
new mode.

What I am hoping is that a few people with working pc532's and working
compilers will build this code and let me know of any problems.
Please report positive as well as negative results.  I will fix any
problems which are reported.  Then I will post a binary for everyone
else to burn into their EPROM's.  I am not aware of anything which
was seriously broken in the last version I posted so I hope people
will not mind waiting a few days.

I hope the monitor is pretty stable now.  The only feature on my wish
list is a command to set the No-Slot Clock.  I expect to just post
cdiff's against these sources in the future.

Bruce Culbertson

