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VM Conventions

Details of IA32's CALL and RET instructions forced major differences in stack and calling conventions. CALL pushes the return address on the stack and then branches to an indicated address. RET pops a return address off the stack and branches to it (discarding an indicated number of parameter bytes in the process).

On AIX the return address is saved at a fixed address in the caller's stackframe. Using CALL effectively prevents this since the relative address of the stacktop off the frame pointer varies from call-site to call-site. To be conveniently accessible at all, the return address must be at a fixed address in the callee's stackframe. Thus, on IA32 the return address starts a new stackframe.

This introduces a number of complications some of them minor.

First, the header is at the bottom of an AIX stackframe but the top of an IA32 stackframe (stacks growing down from high memory in both cases). This does not present a stack addressing problem: stack offsets are positive on AIX, negative on IA32.

Second, the ordering of fields in the headers of stackframes differs on the two architectures. This did not cause a problem since the header fields are always accessed with static final constants off the frame pointer. These constants differ on the two architectures.

Third, the size of stackframes, which is fixed (per method) and known a priori on AIX, varies from call-site to call-site on IA32. On AIX it is natural to check for stack overflow when allocating a new stackframe; on IA32 this requires explicitly testing against a calculated upperbound of the eventual size of the stackframe.

Finally, stack-walking (e.g. during exception handling or garbage collection) was severely complicated by the fact that the return address was in the caller stackframe on AIX and the callee stackframe on IA32. The code difference was finally minimized by adopting the convention that the return address would be computed immediately before moving from callee to caller. On AIX this entails a redundant load off the contents of the callee's frame pointer. But, since stack-walking is not expected to be performance critical, we tolerate the pain in the interest of compatibility.

To facilitate the functional port, we initially added an extra word to the header of an IA32 stackframe. Whenever a method was called, the return address in the callee's stackframe header was copied into the new slot in the caller's header. This allowed immediate utilization of code that assumed the AIX convention. However, restructuring this common code so as to eliminate the need for this redundant header word was an ongoing porting headache for several months.


next up previous
Next: Synchronization Up: Establishing functionality Previous: Other VM Subsystems
Stephen Fink 2002-05-23