Hiroyuki Machida (machida@sm.sony.co.jp) writes: > I think we can assume CPU has branch-likely insns, if CPU has MIPS > ISA 2 or greater ISA.. "MIPS II" is officially the instruction set introduced for the long lost R6000 CPU. But "MIPS II" is now used to mean "the 32-bit subset of MIPS III" (which is extremely close to the same thing, but I'm never quite sure about the last details of the R6000 - Kevin would remember better, probably). OK: branch-likely is definitely part of MIPS II and MIPS32. There are still MIPS CPUs in regular use which are based on MIPS I and don't provide them. Generally the advantages of MIPS II are slight, so if you want to build a kernel which will not require instruction-set variants, it's no big deal to restrict it to MIPS I. > (FYI: we can't assume CPU has LL/SC even if CPU has branch-likely > insns. ) LL/SC is also part of MIPS III (and the 32-bit variants are thus taken to be in MIPS II). Unfortunately, the documentation of LL/SC gave the impression that they were useful only in multiprocessor systems, so they were omitted by NEC building the Vr41xx and Toshiba's R59xx. In both cases it's a bug - but since it isn't about to be fixed, you need workarounds. In these more enlightened days, CPU vendors are more likely to ask an operating system person before they leave out bits of the instruction set, so we hope it won't happen again! Dominic Sweetman Algorithmics Ltd The Fruit Farm, Ely Road, Chittering, CAMBS CB5 9PH, ENGLAND phone: +44 1223 706200 / fax: +44 1223 706250 / direct: +44 1223 706205 http://www.algor.co.uk
