Hewlett-packard Company

Anthony Fitzgerald Istvan

Bich-Cau Le

Amit J Patel

William B Buzbee

Cary Coutant

Instruction set interpreter which uses a register stack to efficiently map an application register state

The inventive mechanism allows an application to switch modes during its operation, between a compatibility or legacy mode for a previous architecture, and a native mode for a current architecture. The mechanism includes an official function descriptor which describes information for accessing a function which resides in one module. The OFD has a legacy portion is useable by a legacy module and a native portion is useable by a native module. The mechanism also includes a linkage table that resides in a second module which references the function in the first module. The portion of the OFD which corresponds to the mode of the linkage table module is copied into the linkage table. Each portion contains one entry that corresponds to an address location of the function, and another entry that is a value for a register which refers to the data segment corresponding to the load module containing the function. The information in the OFD depends on whether the function is a legacy function or a native function.

Method and apparatus for the inter-operation of differing architectural and run time conventions

An apparatus for translating a multiple user program into a native machine code to run on a native computer hardware having memory and an operating system that is capable of detecting whether the program has an instruction set architecture different from a native instruction set architecture. The memory has a source file including the program to be translated. At least one source code module is defined as including a plurality of blocks of code mapped to the memory by the operating system. The blocks have one or more source instructions, with each block beginning with one of the source instructions and ending with a branch or a target of the branch. A virtual instruction pointer points to one of the source instructions to be executed. One or more source instructions are dynamically translated and executed, and a profile data is produced. A shared translation file is ultimately created for the source code module using the profile data. The shared translation file is periodically offered to at least one of the users.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Anthony Fitzgerald Istvan