An Architectural Framework for Supporting Heterogeneous Instruction-Set Architectures

  • Authors:
  • Gabriel M. Silberman;Kemal Ebcioglu

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Computer
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

An architectural framework that allows software applications and operating system code written for a given instruction set to migrate to different, higher performance architectures is described. The framework provides a hardware mechanism that enhances application performance while keeping the same program behavior from a user perspective. The framework is designed to accommodate program exceptions, self-modifying code, tracing, and debugging. Examples are given for IBM System/390 operating-system code and AIX utilities, showing the performance potential of the scheme using a very long instruction word (VLIW) machine as the high-performance target architecture.