Inline Assembly Dangers
I’ve been having an issue with the PS2 SDK, using my discord messages for reference, I’ve first run into this since the middle of 2023.
It’s pretty simple, load any PS2SDK ELF, soft reset with ps2link, and load the elf again. This will result in a TLB miss (crash). Investigating, I found that the miss originates in libcglue timezone startup code. Because this is weakly linked, providing an empty stub ‘fixes’ the problem.
I didn’t investigate further. I chalked it up maybe something with reentry within newlib, or maybe the function is just broken. I don’t know much about reentry or timezones so I told anyone who ran into this issue to add that stub and to not use timezones.
A few months later, someone tells me that after a ps2link reset, their graphics are broken. To be more specific, there are 32 pixel height alternating strips of their clear colour and black. My thought was that the zbuffer is somehow pointing to the framebuffer and that what we are seeing is the zbuffer clearing each bottom half of the page. If you’ve taken a look at my fast clearing post, this will make some sense ;)
After cloning their code and adding some logging, sure enough after a soft reset the framebuffer and zbuffer were pointing to the same page address. 0xFFFFFFFF.
