What would the benefit of this be?? You get one additional register, but it 
breaks the entire way the OR is setup (R0 being a '0' register).
I don't think having 1 extra register outweighs the disadvantages.

Richard



On Dec 16, 2011, at 10:05 , Jeremy Bennett wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-12-16 at 09:25 +0100, Olof Kindgren wrote: 
>> 2011/12/16 Matthew Hicks <[email protected]>:
>>> Yeah, I read that part of the manual before.  In my opinion, there should
>>> probably be a patch to the arch manual as well.  It is kind of odd to have a
>>> special register like r0 that isn't fully defined at the ISA level.  Every
>>> other architecture that has a similar r0 == 0 has r0 hard-wired to zero.
>> 
>> I agree with Matthews. Sure, we get another multi-purpose register,
>> but I don't think it's worth the pain of not knowing if it's really
>> zero
> 
> (should have read the whole thread before my previous reply)
> 
> This brings an incompatibility into the tool chain. Code written for the
> new processor will not necessarily work on the old processor. Given
> there are now real users of OpenRISC out there (e.g. Samsung DTV boxes),
> we need to be very wary of this.
> 
> It is a dangerous change, because it is useful, so lots of new code will
> be written assuming this functionality is there, and will break on any
> older design.
> 
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> -- 
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