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.

Course-specific notes: Within this course, you will not be doing any serious assembly language programming. However, you must be able to read enough assembly language to understand how linkers work.

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.