The Hardware Checking Mechanism of SMC in High-Performance Systems
Hao Zhang · Computer Engineering and Science · 2009
The superscalar pipeline and the cache mechanism make SMC (Self-Modifying Code) a problem in mainstream processing systems. It is necessary to handle this case for compatibility and keep supporting the programs with SMC. This paper analyzes many programs for their SMC behaviors and several methods for SMC handling,and gives a facile method that can be easily implemented to handle the SMC problem. A FIFO queue is used for checking SMC out of the pipeline,decreasing the complexity of the logic,and multiplexing the data memory access paths to avoid the use of multi-port design. In this way,the processor area is reduced by 1.16% ,while the performance is influenced no more than 0.1%.