Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

Program-synchronous exceptions, for example, breakpoints, watchpoints, illegal opcodes, and memory access violations, provide information about exceptional conditions, interrupting the program and vectoring to an operating system handler. Over the last decade, however, programs and run-time systems have increasingly employed these mechanisms as a performance optimization to detect normal and expected conditions. Unfortunately, current architecture and operating system structures are designed for exceptional or erroneous conditions, where performance is of secondary importance, rather than normal conditions. Consequently, this has limited the practicality of such hardware-based detection mechanisms.We propose both hardware and software structures that permit efficient handling of synchronous exceptions by user-level code. We demonstrate a software implementation that reduces exception-delivery cost by an order-of-magnitude on current RISC processors, and show the performance benefits of that mechanism for several example applications.

REFERENCES

• Agarwal et al. 90: Anant Agarwal , Beng-Hong Lim , David Kranz , John Kubiatowicz, APRIL: a processor architecture for multiprocessing, Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture, p.104-114, May 28-31, 1990, Seattle, Washington, United States
• Alverson et al. 90: Robert Alverson , David Callahan , Daniel Cummings , Brian Koblenz , Allan Porterfield , Burton Smith, The Tera computer system, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Supercomputing, p.1-6, June 11-15, 1990, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Anderson et al. 91: Thomas E. Anderson , Henry M. Levy , Brian N. Bershad , Edward D. Lazowska, The interaction of architecture and operating system design, Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.108-120, April 08-11, 1991, Santa Clara, California, United States
• Appel & Li 91: Andrew W. Appel , Kai Li, Virtual memory primitives for user programs, Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.96-107, April 08-11, 1991, Santa Clara, California, United States
• Appel et al. 88: A. W. Appel , J. R. Ellis , K. Li, Real-time concurrent collection on stock multiprocessors, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1988 conference on Programming Language design and Implementation, p.11-20, June 20-24, 1988, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• Boehm & Weiser 88: Hans-Juergen Boehm , Mark Weiser, Garbage collection in an uncooperative environment, Software—Practice & Experience, v.18 n.9, p.807-820, September 1988 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380180902]
• Chang & Mergen 88: Albert Chang , Mark F. Mergen, 801 storage: architecture and programming, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.6 n.1, p.28-50, Feb. 1988 [doi>10.1145/35037.42270]
• Cockshot et al. 84: W. Cockshot, M. Atkinson, K. Chisholm, P. Bailey, and R. Morrison. Persistent object management system. Software--Practice and Experience, 14(1 ):251-272, January 1984.
• Hosking & Moss 93: Antony L. Hosking , J. Eliot B. Moss, Protection traps and alternatives for memory management of an object-oriented language, Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.106-119, December 05-08, 1993, Asheville, North Carolina, United States
• Kane & Heinrich 92: Gerry Kane , Joe Heinrich, MIPS RISC architectures, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1992
• Kranz et al. 89: D. A. Kranz , R. H. Halstead, Jr. , E. Mohr, Mul-T: a high-performance parallel Lisp, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1989 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.81-90, June 19-23, 1989, Portland, Oregon, United States
• Li & Hudak 89: Kai Li , Paul Hudak, Memory coherence in shared virtual memory systems, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.7 n.4, p.321-359, Nov. 1989 [doi>10.1145/75104.75105]
• Lieberman & Hewitt 83: Henry Lieberman , Carl Hewitt, A real-time garbage collector based on the lifetimes of objects, Communications of the ACM, v.26 n.6, p.419-429, June 1983 [doi>10.1145/358141.358147]
• Massalin & Pu 89: H. Massalin , C. Pu, Threads and input/output in the synthesis kernal, Proceedings of the twelfth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.191-201, November 1989
• Ousterhout 90: J. K. Ousterhout. Why aren't operating systems getting faster as fast as hardware? In Proceedings of the Summer 1990 USENIX Conference, pages 247- 256, June 1990.
• Patience 93: Simon Patience, Redirecting System Calls in Mach 3.0, An alternative to the Emulator, USENIX MACH III Symposium, p.57-74, April 19-21, 1993
• Ungar 84: David Ungar, Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm, Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments, p.157-167, April 1984
• Wahbe 92: Robert Wahbe, Efficient data breakpoints, Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.200-212, October 12-15, 1992, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• White & DeWitt 92: Seth J. White , David J. DeWitt, A Performance Study of Alternative Object Faulting and Pointer Swizzling Strategies, Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.419-431, August 23-27, 1992
• Wilson & Kakkad 92: P. R. Wilson and S. V. Kakkad. Pointer swizzling at page fault time: Efficiently and compatibly supporting huge address spaces on standard hardware. In Proceedings of the 1992 international Workshop on Object Orientation in Operating Systems, pages 364-377, September 1992.
• Young 89: Michael Wayne Young, Exporting a user interface to memory management from a communication-oriented operating system, 1989

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Control structures

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.0 GENERAL
      Subjects: Instruction set design (e.g., RISC, CISC, VLIW)

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Measurement, Performance, Theory