Squashing the LRU bug

Just for once I did not rush to an online forum and say I had found a bug in a product – and I was right not too.

Having tried three different cross compiler toolchains I convinced myself that the issue was plainly neither compiler (or, to be more accurate in this case, assembler) output but some process in my code that was causing corruption. And sure enough I found that I was mangling the physical addresses of my page frames.

Thanks to the way OVPsim operates – by default it provides physical mappings on demand for the full 4GB address space of a 32 bit register – this mangling did not generate a page fault, but it did mean that for certain sequences of instructions – particularly those where lots of page faults were likely to occur, memory was being corrupted.

Changing one line of assembly – so that virtual address output was written to virtual address slot and not the physical address slot in my simple list of page table entries fixed that.

So now the code works – at least I think it does!