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US 2006/0041791 A1Published application
Hardware assist for microcode tracing
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsWalker Carroll, Douglas Joseph, Gabriel Tarr
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Debugging microcode is facilitated by a hardware assist that takes over from the microcode the basic management of handling the data for a trace entry, thereby reducing the load on the microcode to a single micro-instruction per trace operation and thereby permitting more trace points to be included in the microcode shipped to the field.
Claims20
A method of storing trace data in a data processing system controlled by microcode comprising the steps of:
- executing a microinstruction in said microcode that writes a selected subset of trace data to a hardware queue;
- copying said selected subset of trace data under hardware control from said hardware queue to a hardware buffer;
- and
- processing said subset of trace data.
1 more element
A data processing system controlled by microcode comprising:
- a CPU;
- a set of microcode comprising a set of microinstructions including at least one microinstruction for writing a selected subset of trace data to a hardware queue;
- and
- control means for copying said selected subset of trace data under hardware control from said hardware queue to a hardware buffer.
1 more element
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.