On Thu, 11 Sep 1997, Jeremy Cooper wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, 12 Sep 1997, David Jones wrote:
> 
> > I am about to buy a Sparc architecture manual, but before I do:
> > - does the V9 manual cover the V7/V8 architectures as well?
> 
> The V9 manual contains an appendix section which iterates
> differences/additions from V8.  Nothing is mentioned about V7 in the V9
> _or_ V8 manuals.  However, you won't need the V7 documentation as your
> SPARC IPC is V8.  If you are on a tight budget and can't buy both books
> just for the heck of it, it looks like you could glean the entire V8
> architecture from the appendix.

If you are really interested in the V7/V8 supervisor programming I would
not recommend purchasing the V9 manual.  

V7 and V8 are almost identical. The major differences are the PSO memory
model and accompanying STBAR instruction, full integer mulltiply/divide
instead of using the step instructions, and new quad precision floating
point.  The rest is pretty much the same.

For V9 the entire supervisor model is different.  The register window
control registers have changed completely, the trap model bears little
relation to V8, there is support for nested traps, the reference MMU has
nothing in common with the V8 MMU, and the ASIs are different and used
differently.

Although there is an appendix listing the changes between V8 and V9, I
doubt it's complete enough to do any supervisor code without other sources
of knowledge about the V8 architecture.  Things are just done in different
ways because things you can do on a V9 machine cannot be done on a V8 and
visa-versa. 

Now if you plan to do user level coding, although there are significant
changes, you could probably get by with a V9 manual.  Just remember those
three delay slots after writing to an ASR.

=========================================================================
Eduardo Horvath				eeh@btr.com
"Cliffs are for climbing.  That's why God invented grappling hooks."
					- Benton Frasier