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I’ve been reading about the MIPS assembly language for a while, just to learn. I get now that syscalls and exceptions in user code make the processor jump to a certain location in memory where the kernel and exception handled reside.
What I am curious about is how the OS can access peripherals, as I can’t see any other relevant instructions. Does the processor export its own set of fundamental syscalls, or do the peripherals somehow get mapped to memory?
MIPS does not have special IO instructions. Peripherals are mapped to the flat physical address space via some memory bus interface and then accessed using standard load/store instructions. MIPS does have coprocessor control instructions which could be used to manipulate some peripherals (primarily the MMU or cache controller), but these are not often used for general-purpose device interfaces.