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VM Register Conventions

The initial functional port followed the PowerPC implementation in dedicating four (of the eight IA32 ``general purpose'') registers: a pointer to the currently executing stackframe (FP), a pointer to a region of static data (JTOC), an indirect pointer to thread-local storage for the current Java thread (TI), and a pointer to pthread-local storage associated with the current virtual processor (PR). In addition, it dedicated esp as a stack pointer, leaving only three registers for general use. It soon became apparent that good performance would hinge in part on freeing up some of these dedicated registers.

We first reclaimed the TI and JTOC registers. Instead of dedicating registers to hold these values, the system now caches these values in the pthread-local storage accessed by the PR register. This strategy adds an extra indirection to access Java thread-local and static storage.

Next, we reclaimed the frame pointer register. This change required more intrusive system modifications. As with TI and JTOC, the system caches the current frame pointer register in pthread-local storage. Each compiler was modified to maintain this frame pointer field in the prologue and epilogue sequences. The C trap handler that handles a hardware trap or software interrupt was modified to acquire the frame pointer indirectly through the PR register instead of from a register. Additionally, each compiler was modified to manage stack storage solely off the stack pointer (esp), with no reliance on the frame pointer. There were also some complications with IA32 baseline compiler assumptions for low-level details of stack resizing and GC map computation, which fall beyond the scope of this paper.

The current system has two dedicated IA32 registers: SP (esp) and PR (esi). The remaining six GPR registers are available for register allocation. We have considered reclaiming PR as a non-volatile by using an IA32 segment register as a pointer to pthread-local storage. Three considerations have so far deterred us from making the attempt. First, since the segment registers can't address arbitrary words in memory, it would be difficult to encode the structures that they point to a ordinary Java objects. Second, we do not feel certain that Linux does not, or, more importantly, will not in the future use any particular segment register for its own purposes. Third, we are concerned that on some IA32 implementations segment register access might be prohibitively slow.


next up previous
Next: Instruction Selection Up: Improving performance Previous: Improving performance
Stephen Fink 2002-05-23