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US 7,606,999 B2Granted
Merging branch information with sync points
AssigneeTexas Instruments Incorporated
InventorManisha Agarwala
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method for merging branch information with sync points is disclosed herein. The method comprises determining whether a sync point is to be generated concurrent with a branch instruction and generating said sync point to include a program counter value and to indicate that the sync point occurred concurrent with the branch instruction.
Claims12
A method, comprising:
- determining whether a sync point is to be generated concurrent with an encountering of a branch instruction, wherein the sync point comprises a packet of information that is transmitted by a target system to a host computer and causes the host computer to synchronize trace streams;
- and
- generating said sync point to include a value stored in a program counter at the time the sync point is generated and to indicate that the sync point occurred concurrent with the encountering of a branch instruction, wherein said generating comprises causing a single bit in the sync point to indicate that said program counter value represents a target address of a branch instruction.
A method, comprising:
- encountering a first branch instruction during execution of a program;
- populating a program counter register file with a target address of said first branch instruction;
- and
- encoding a bit in the program counter register file to indicate that said target address in the program counter register file is a target address of a branch instruction;
- generating a sync point to include a value stored in a program counter at the time the sync point is generated and to indicate, using a single bit, that the sync point occurred concurrent with the encountering of a second branch instruction and thus the program counter value represents a target address of a second branch instruction, wherein the sync point comprises a packet of information that is transmitted by a target system to a host computer and causes the host computer to synchronize trace streams.
2 more elements
A system, comprising:
- a central processing unit (CPU) core;
- and
- a trace subsystem coupled to said CPU core, said trace subsystem determines when a sync point is to be generated concurrent with an encountering of a branch instruction and generates said sync point to include a value stored in a program counter at the time the sync point is generated and to indicate that the sync point occurred concurrent with the encountering of a branch instruction, wherein the sync point comprises a packet of information that is transmitted by a target system to a host computer and causes the host computer to synchronize trace streams;
- wherein said trace subsystem generates said sync point by causing a single bit in said sync point to indicate that the program counter value in the sync point represents a target address of a branch instruction.
1 more element
A storage medium containing software that, when executed by a processor, causes the processor to:
- receive a sync point from a target system, said sync point containing a value stored in a program counter at the time the sync point is generated and a single, first bit that indicates whether the program counter value represents a target address of a branch instruction, wherein the sync point causes the processor to synchronize trace streams;
- and
- decode said sync point to retrieve said program counter value and to determine whether the program counter value represents the target address.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.