22.4k views
5 votes
Write a MIPS program which sleeps for 4 seconds before exiting. Hint: Remember to use milliseconds (1 second = 1000 milliseconds)

a. delay 4000; exit
b. sleep 4000; end
c. wait 4000; terminate
d. pause 4000; stop

1 Answer

5 votes

Final answer:

In MIPS assembly language, you might implement a 4-second sleep using a system call, but the functionality for a sleep system call is not typically standard and depends on the system's environment. A non-standard syscall might be used, or otherwise, a cycle-counting loop would be necessary to approximate a delay.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question asks to write a MIPS assembly language program that includes a delay or sleep function for a certain amount of time before the program exits. MIPS does not inherently have a sleep function, so you would typically call an operating system service or implement a timer loop to create a delay. In most cases, you would use a system call to pause the execution which is done with the syscall instruction in MIPS.

To create a 4-second delay before exiting, assuming you are using an environment that supports the syscall for sleep (which is not standard in all MIPS systems), your program might look like this:

li $v0, 32 # The system call for sleep may be 32li $a0, 4000 # Argument for sleep: number of milliseconds to pausesyscall # Execute the sleep callli $v0, 10 # The system call for exitsyscall # Execute the exit call

If your environment does not support a sleep syscall, you would need to implement a loop that counts down a certain amount of cycles that would approximate four seconds. However, most educational MIPS simulators do not have such a function, and real-time sleeping would be highly environment-dependent.

User Ian Chadwick
by
6.9k points