Seventy becomes seventy one: a machine that can wait
HALT is terminal - stepCPU returns at once when the Halt Flag is up, so a halted machine does not execute, service devices, or take an interrupt - and that has to stay true, because every test ends with a halt and "halted" is how a program says it has finished. The consequence was that SplitBit had no way to wait at all. Every wait was a spin, and a spin is bus traffic: 11.5% of Type over a 14K file on a disk of ten thousand cycles, after read-ahead had already hidden three quarters of the latency. WAIT is 0xFE, one byte, no operands, sitting under HALT where the instruction that almost stops the machine belongs. Three decisions in it: - A line already standing means there is nothing to wait for, so WAIT does nothing. That is what makes test-then-wait race-free. - Any line ends the wait, masked or not, so a program can sleep on a device it has no handler for and read its status afterwards. Masking says who answers a request, not whether it happened. - A line that wakes the CPU without being dispatched is taken down by the WAIT. Left standing it would be found by the next WAIT, which would return at once - the program would spin exactly as before while looking as though it slept. Waiting is NOT a Status bit, and that is the trap avoided rather than a gap: Status rides into the interrupt frame and comes back out, so a machine interrupted mid-wait would return from its handler still waiting, and wait again for what it had already been given. An internal field instead. Idle cycles are counted apart from bus cycles and the halt line says so when there are any, which is what makes the difference observable at all - with the line-clearing removed the total moves by ONE cycle, 20,100 against 20,099, and only the idle half changes, halving to 9,976. A test on totals could never have seen it. Tests/terminal.sh asks that question, being the file for things a recorded output cannot see, and fails with the clear removed while "both reads finished" still passes. Three collisions, all found by building it: - 0xFE was the assembler's "not an instruction" sentinel. getOpcode now answers a negative NOT_AN_OPCODE, which is outside the range of every possible answer instead of inside the unused part of it. - 0xFE was also what faultTest and faultResumeTest executed to provoke a fault. They now use 0xFD and say why, because they did not fail when it became an instruction - they HUNG, having started sleeping instead. - Keys.asm has had a label called "wait" for a year, and mnemonics are matched uppercased. What that reported was "Branch without label" at the BRQ thirty lines away. The assembler now refuses a label that is already an instruction, at the label, by name; every instruction added takes a word out of the space of label names, so this will happen again.
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@@ -75,6 +75,19 @@ typedef struct {
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// cost the same, and that a CALL moving ten bytes of Stack cost what a branch costs,
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// which is not true of any machine anybody could build.
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unsigned long busCycles;
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// ---- And what it has cost while doing nothing ----
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//
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// Clocks spent inside WAIT, where the CPU is stopped and the bus is idle. They are
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// counted because time still has to pass - a device that takes a while has to be able
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// to finish - and they are counted SEPARATELY because they are not the same thing as
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// work. A machine waiting on a disk is not using memory, and charging it as though it
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// were is exactly the sort of dishonest number the bus count was built to replace.
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unsigned long idleCycles;
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// Whether the CPU is stopped in a WAIT, which is not a Status bit and must not become
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// one: the Status register rides into the interrupt frame and comes back out of it, so
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// a machine interrupted while waiting would return from the handler still waiting, and
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// wait again for the thing it had already been given.
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uint8_t Waiting;
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// Set alongside the Fault Flag, and read only by whatever reports the stop.
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uint8_t Fault; // A FaultCause.
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uint8_t FaultVector; // Which vector was empty, when Fault is FAULT_NO_HANDLER.
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