COMP 320 SPARC Assembly Language Programming

The less useful official SPARC Assembly Language V9 manual is available online via Sun or locally via the searchable database /usr/openwin/bin/answerbook. See especially chapters 1, 2, 5, A, B, and E. Or, see the recommended SPARC textbook.

Course-specific notes: Within thise course, you need to know only the following V8/V9 subset, which is supported by both the standard SPARC assembler and by the parser provided for your assembler-writing project. Remember that for the RPN-in-SPARC project, you care only about the instruction meanings, whereas in the assembler project, you care only about the instruction encodings.

When programming assembly, the two most common run-time error messages are

• Segmentation fault: You are breaking the permissions of the memory pages. Common reasons are
  • You are writing to read-only memory, including the read-only data or the text (code).
  • You are reading or writing the first page of memory, typically because you are dereferencing the NULL pointer.
  • You data and stack segments have overlapped, typically because you have recurred too much.
• Bus error: You are breaking the expected memory alignment, typically trying to read or write a word at a non-word-aligned address.