These + and - characters in a branch mnemonic can cause the assembler to
produce conditional branch instructions with that hint the branch
predictor. The default for forward branches is -, and for backward
branches is +. If a mnemonic is issued with the opposite sign, then bit
10 of the instruction (the LSB of the BO field) is set.
My long-retired "ppcdisasm" script inserted these hints unconditionally,
despite 98% of them not being required. The code is much cleaner now.
I read in some old MPW release notes that PPCAsm and PPCLink together
exhibit a quirk when linking conditional branches to imported symbols.
PPCAsm always assembles these conditional branches as if they were
forward branches (that is, a + hint will always set the hint bit, and a
- hint will never). I hoped to use this property to divine whether the
NanoKernel was linked from one or many assembly files, but I was
frustrated by the lack of conditional branches between files.
This is part of the work to get the mini running well. The
kcPowerDispatch and kcCacheDispatch entry points were explored. The dead
code implementing a Timer "Heartbeat" was also used to label some
structures better.
Namely queues, semaphores, critical regions, event groups and
"notifications". The MP calls implementing these services have been
named after their MPLibrary wrapper functions. This convention will be
followed in the future (no more NKCreateEvent).
