Intel Corporation

Brian L Vajda

Gilbert A Neiger

Jason W Brandt

Baiju V Patel

H Peter Anvin

James B Crossland

Asit K Mallick

Xiaoning Li

Toby Opferman

Kunal Mehta

James S Coke

Atul A Khare

Balaji Masanamuthu Chinnathurai

Systems, methods, and apparatuses to support instructions for a hardware assisted heterogeneous instruction set architecture dispatcher are described. In one embodiment, a hardware processor includes a plurality of processor cores comprising a first type of processor core that supports a first instruction set architecture and a second type of processor core that supports a second different instruction set architecture, a decoder circuit of a processor core of the plurality of processor cores to decode a single instruction into a decoded single instruction, the single instruction including a field that identifies a requested core type and an opcode that indicates an execution circuit of the processor core is to: read a register to determine a core type of the processor core, cause the processor core to enter a first mode, that only permits execution of the first instruction set architecture by the processor core, when the requested core type and the core type of the processor core are the first type, cause the processor core to enter a second mode, that only permits execution of the second different instruction set architecture by the processor core, when the requested core type and the core type of the processor core are the second type, cause the processor core to enter a third mode, that only permits execution of the first instruction set architecture by the processor core, when the requested core type is the second type and the core type of the processor core is the first type, and cause the processor core to enter a fourth mode, that only permits execution of the second different instruction set architecture by the processor core, when the requested core type is the first type and the core type of the processor core is the second type, and the execution circuit of the processor core to execute the decoded single instruction according to the opcode.

Apparatuses, methods, and systems for instructions for a hardware assisted heterogeneous instruction set architecture dispatcher

An example processing system may comprise: a lower stack bound register configured to store a first memory address, the first memory address identifying a lower bound of a memory addressable via a stack segment; an upper stack bound register configured to store a second memory address, the second memory address identifying an upper bound of the memory addressable via the stack segment; and a stack bounds checking logic configured to detect unauthorized stack pivoting, by comparing a memory address being accessed via the stack segment with at least one of the first memory address and the second memory address.

Systems and methods for preventing unauthorized stack pivoting

Growing community of inventors

Portland, OR, United States of America

Brian L Vajda