SRET: a handler answers the way a subroutine does

CALL saves A, B and Data Pointers 0 to 2 and nothing else, which is exactly
why Q and DP3 are how a subroutine hands something back. An interrupt saves
all of it, so a service with an answer had to reach into its own frame and
un-save two fields by hand:

  MVSD.2
  DPUP.2 0d02           ; the saved Q, by an offset it had to know
  STA.2
  RETI

Thirty places in CosmOS did that. Every one knew the frame's layout by
heart, and all thirty would have gone quietly wrong the day the frame
gained a field - the same duplicated fact this project keeps being bitten
by, except duplicated into thirty places AND into the CPU.

SRET is 0x76, in the seat the block split left for it. It is RETI's frame
with RET's rule applied: A, B and DP0 to DP2 come back, the saved Q and DP3
are dropped, and the Interrupt Flag is restored from the frame - only that
bit, so carry survives a service the way it survives a call, and there is
one rule rather than two. RETI stays exactly as it was: a hardware handler
has nothing to say and must leave no trace.

CosmOS is 10,969 bytes against 11,122, and no handler knows a frame offset.

TWO MISTAKES WORTH RECORDING, both mine, both caught by tests.

The first conversion matched STA.2 with a regular expression that did not
allow a trailing comment, so it ran past the end of one handler and into
the next. The second understood the pattern and still got it wrong: the old
frame write carried the answer from A into the saved Q slot, so simply
deleting the write left Q holding whatever it happened to hold. Services
that answer by calling something were fine - Q already had it - and
services that set A directly silently reported success for every failure.
cosmosCwd is what noticed, by saying "cannot go there" about a directory
that was there. Sixteen handlers move the answer into Q now.

Seven MVQA went with it. They copied Q into A so the frame write could
carry it; SRET puts A back, so they moved a value nobody would ever read.
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-08-27 18:18:36 -04:00
parent cd5f548736
commit c8c9f0b363
9 changed files with 275 additions and 133 deletions
+1 -1
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@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ wrote Asm.sbx: program 7533, data 4099, labels 555
## The Machine:
- **Harvard architecture.** Two 64K memories, one for instructions and one for data. An instruction can only read the second, which is why strings live there and why the memory controller exists.
- **Its own instruction set**, 71 instructions, four Data Pointers, and a Q register that holds what the ALU last worked out. Small enough that the table describing it fits in the machine's own memory, which is what lets it disassemble and assemble for itself.
- **Its own instruction set**, 72 instructions, four Data Pointers, and a Q register that holds what the ALU last worked out. Small enough that the table describing it fits in the machine's own memory, which is what lets it disassemble and assemble for itself.
- **Interrupts.** Software traps, hardware lines from devices, and faults, all arriving through one vector table with a full context save.
- **A bus programs can enumerate**, so a program can ask what a machine is made of rather than being told.
- **A memory controller** that reads and writes Program Memory, moves blocks between banks, reaches memory that devices bring with them, and guards a range against being written by accident. It is how a SplitBit machine loads a program.