We'll just touch briefly on some of the SPARC instructions, so you can get a feel for what you'll be seeing in disassembled output. The operations can be divided into some basic functional types based on what they do.
The load and store instructions we'll look at in more detail shortly. These are the only ones that reference memory. Therefore, any kernel panic resulting in a data fault message (an example of a memory access error condition) will most likely involve one of these instructions. All arithmetic and logical instructions refer to registers or small constants in the instruction code itself. These cannot cause memory reference traps, because there is nothing that they can do except touch registers. The instructions include things like add, subtract, multiply and divide, plus the logical or Boolean operations: AND, OR, NOT, exclusive OR. These also come in two flavors: one that just does the operation and another that adds the action of setting condition code bits based on the result. |