Detecting Exceptions on OpenBSD and MIPS

The MIPS processor exception handling sequence uses two reserved general-purpose registers, k0 and k1. When the exception occurs, the core jumps to the exception handler address, then using only k0 and k1, the handler must save enough state to handle the exception. To prevent information leakage from kernel-space to user-space, OpenBSD clears k0 and k1 to zero near the end of the exception handler. By populating k0 or k1 with a non-zero value, we simply need to poll one to detect when an exception occurs.