|
Free ebooks
 Operating System Linux Morgan Kaufmann See MIPS Run 2nd Edition - Linux
|
 We start in Chapter 1 with some history and background, and set MIPS in context by discussing the technological concerns and ideas thatwere uppermost in the minds of its inventors. Then in Chapter 2 we discuss the characteristics of the MIPS machine language that follow from their approach.To help you see the big picture, we leave out the details of processor control until Chapter 3, which introduces the ugly but eminently practical system that allows MIPS CPUs to deal with their caches, exceptions and startup, and memory management. Those last three topics, respectively, become the subjects of Chapters 4 through 6. The MIPS architecture has been careful to separate out the part of the instruction set that deals with floating-point numbers. That separation allows MIPS CPUs to be built with various levels of floating-point support, from none at all through partial implementations to somewhere near the state of the art. So we have also separated out the floating-point functions, and we keep them back until Chapter 7. Up to this point, the chapters follow a reasonable sequence for getting to know MIPS. The following chapters change gear and are more like reference manuals or example-based tutorials. In Chapter 8, we go through the whole machine instruction set; the intention is to be precise but much more terse than the standard MIPS reference works—we cover in 10 pages what takes a hundred in other sources.1 Chapter 9 is a brief introduction to reading and writing assembly, and falls far short of an assembly programming manual. Chapter 10 is a checklist with helpful hints for those of you who have to port software between another CPU and a MIPS CPU. The longest section tackles the troublesome problem of endianness in CPUs, software, and systems. Chapter 11 is a bare-bones summary of the software conventions necessary to produce interworking software with different toolkits. Chapter 12 introduces the debug and profiling features standardized for MIPS CPUs. Then we’re on to seeing how MIPS runs GNU/Linux.We describe relationship between the Linux kernel and a computer architecture in Chapter 13; then Chapters 14 and 15 dig down into some of the detail as to how the MIPS architecture does what the Linux kernel needs. Chapter 16 gives you a quick look at the dynamic linking magic that makes GNU/Linux applications work. Download free ebooks of linux: See MIPS Run 2nd - Linux
|
