PDP-12 at the RICM

[Guy Sotomayor]

On 7/14/15 9:22 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
>>  The 8086 had four segment registers:
>>     CS    - Code segment, used with IP register
>>     DS    - Data segment
>>     SS    - Stack segment, used with SP and BP registers
>>     ES    - Extra segment, used with DI for string instructions as
>>           destination (DS:SI as source)
>>  You could override instructions dealing with memory with any of the
>> segment registers:
>
> If you were writing an emulator, what would you have it do if an 
> interrupt occurred while in a REP operation with a segment override?
>
> Just how accurately should an emulator match the behavior of the 
> emulated processor?

It's actually described in the Intel SDM (Software Developer's Manual).  ;-)

The start of the instruction is actually the segment override (one of 
the things
that makes decoding x86 instructions hard).  Since the REP XXX 
instructions are
interruptible, the IP does not move to the next instruction until after 
it completes
(and the state of the REP XXX instruction is kept in various registers 
that are
updated on each iteration).

So, when an interrupt occurs, the execution is stopped (after the current
iteration completes) and is restarted when the interrupt returns.

TTFN - Guy