Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Porting OS Kernels and Applications to the Underlying Hardware
Many insiders, including Linus Torvalds himself, have stated that it would be impossible to port an operating system kernel like Linux to the bare TM5xxx hardware, let alone user programs. The information learned from this reverse engineering effort does indeed seem to support this claim.
First of all, as discussed in the Branch Unit section, there is absolutely no hardware support for executing code directly from user memory. There is also no instruction TLB, and the L1 i-cache is physically mapped and tagged. Since all modern OS kernels (including Linux) assume that their own code pages are translated by the virtual memory mechanism, it would be impossible to port Linux to the bare Crusoe hardware without this capability.
There is also the issue of privileged instructions. As discussed in the Load Store Unit section, the TM58xx appears to support three main kinds of loads and stores: x86 in user mode, x86 in kernel mode and CMS physical space. The x86 protection scheme would fall apart if user applications are allowed to execute kernel context loads/stores and other privileged operations from user space, yet the underlying hardware provides no checking of this.
It appears that when CMS translates an x86 instruction trace, it will do so according to the context in which execution of the block was attempted (i.e., user mode or kernel mode). This may result in two separate versions of a given code block if executed from both the kernel and user space. Consequently, the translator will never generate privileged instructions in user code.
There is also the frequency scaling problem described in the Hardware Oddities section. User code targeting the native hardware ISA would have very restrictive scheduling of certain instructions without runtime awareness of the processor’s unusual critical path restrictions.
Finally, it would be impossible to aggressively schedule loads and stores in native code without any corresponding sequentially ordered representation, i.e., x86 code, to fall back on in case of an exception. Without this, the exception handler would be unable to resolve the faulting instruction’s dependency chain, since the hardware assumes CMS will interpret the block sequentially until the exception is found and resolved.
Pages: « Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next »
Discuss (6 comments)