US 2015/0040111 A1 · HANDLING PRECOMPILED BINARIES IN A HARDWARE ACCELERATED SOFTWARE TRANSACTIONAL MEMORY SYSTEM

Abstract

A method and apparatus for enabling a Software Transactional Memory (STM) with precompiled binaries is herein described. Upon encountering an access operation in a transaction, an annotation field associated with a memory location referenced by the access is checked. In response to the memory location representing a previous similar access within the transaction, the access is performed without access barriers. However, if the annotation field is in a default state representing no previous access during a pendancy of the transaction, then a mode of the processor is determined. If the processor mode is in implicit mode, an access handler/barrier is asynchronously executed. Conversely, in an explicit mode, a flag is set instead of asynchronously executing the handler. In addition, during compilation convert explicit and convert implicit instructions are inserted to intelligently convert modes for precompiled and newly compiled binaries. Furthermore, new versions of newly compiled functions may be inserted to provide strong atomicity between previously and newly compiled functions.

Claims21

Dependent claims

An apparatus comprising:

a resource to execute a first transaction including a first access referencing a memory line, wherein in response to encountering the first access, the resource is to:
set an annotation field associated with the memory line to an accessed value;
execute a handler, in response to the resource being in a first mode of operation;
and
set a flag field to a flagged value, in response to the resource being in a second mode of operation.

2 more elements

An article of manufacture including program code which, when executed by a machine, causes the machine to perform the operations of:

detecting an access referencing an address in a first transaction;
inserting a first instruction in response to detecting the access, when executed by a resource, to:
determine if an annotation field associated with the address holds a first state;
perform the access in response to determining the annotation field holds the first state;
in response to the annotation field not holding the first state:
execute an asynchronous trap to an access barrier, in response to the resource being in a first mode of execution;
and set a flag field to a flag value, in response to the resource being in a second mode of execution.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Handling precompiled binaries in a hardware accelerated software transactional memory system

Life of this patent

Handling precompiled binaries in a hardware accelerated software transactional memory system

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims21