Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Bruno C Silva

Martin Taillefer

Darek Josip Mihocka

Baining Guo

Xin Tong

Gang Chen

Stanley William Adermann

Megan Lesley Tedesco

Landon M Dyer

Chen Li

Hongbo Jiang

Yaohua Hu

Joshua Harrison

Alex Pfaffe

Various technologies and techniques are disclosed for using transactional memory hardware to accelerate virtualization or emulation. State isolation can be facilitated by providing isolated private state on transactional memory hardware and storing the stack of a host that is performing an emulation in the isolated private state. Memory accesses performed by a central processing unit can be monitored by software to detect that a guest being emulated has made a self modification to its own code sequence. Transactional memory hardware can be used to facilitate dispatch table updates in multithreaded environments by taking advantage of the atomic commit feature. An emulator is provided that uses a dispatch table stored in main memory to convert a guest program counter into a host program counter. The dispatch table is accessed to see if the dispatch table contains a particular host program counter for a particular guest program counter.

Leveraging transactional memory hardware to accelerate virtualization and emulation

A system and method for presenting content related to a radio broadcast are provided. The system may include a radio device having a receiver configured to receive a radio signal including an audio component and digitally encoded data associated with the audio component. The radio device may further include a decoder configured to decode the digitally encoded data from the radio signal. The radio device may further include a processor configured to receive the digitally encoded data from the decoder, extract a data parameter from the digitally encoded data, send a search query including the data parameter to a content service, and receive from the content service metadata associated with the data parameter. The system may further include a display configured to display the metadata received from the content service.

Obtaining and presenting metadata related to a radio broadcast

Various technologies and techniques are disclosed for using transactional memory hardware to accelerate virtualization or emulation. One or more central processing units are provided with transactional memory hardware that is operable to accelerate virtualization. The transactional memory hardware has a facility to maintain private state, a facility to render memory accesses from other central processing units visible to software, and support for atomic commit of the private state. The transactional memory hardware can be used, for example, to facilitate emulation of precise exception semantics. The private state is operable to enable an emulated state to remain inconsistent with an architectural state and only synchronized on certain boundaries. An optimized sequence of instructions is executed using chunk-accurate simulation to try and achieve a same end effect.

Leveraging transactional memory hardware to accelerate virtualization emulation

Various technologies and techniques are disclosed for using transactional memory hardware to accelerate virtualization or emulation. A central processing unit is provided with the transactional memory hardware. Code backpatching can be facilitated by providing transactional memory hardware that supports a facility to maintain private memory state and an atomic commit feature. Changes made to certain code are stored in the private state facility. Backpatching changes are enacted by attempting to commit all the changes to memory at once using the atomic commit feature. An efficient call return stack can be provided by using transactional memory hardware. A call return cache stored in the private state facility captures a host address to return to after execution of a guest function completes. A direct-lookup hardware-based hash table is used for the call return cache.

A computing device hosts a virtual machine executing a guest that issues guest hardware requests by way of any of a plurality of paths. Such paths include a path to non-existent virtual hardware, where an emulator intercepts and processes such guest hardware request with a corresponding actual hardware command; a path to an instantiated operating system, where the instantiated operating system processes each such guest hardware request with a corresponding actual hardware request; and a path to device hardware, where the device hardware directly processes each such guest hardware request.

Partial virtualization on computing device

Systems and methods are presented for real-time realistic river modeling. In one implementation, when provided with the physical features of a modeled terrain, the systems and methods described herein automatically determine a watercourse route in relation to the terrain and calculate river borders. The systems and methods then calculate a surface structure for the river between the borders and map texture coordinates to the surface structure. The systems and methods apply textures at the texture coordinates to provide an animated, view-dependent representation of wave geometries for the modeled water surface including reflection, refraction, and Fresnel effects.

River modeling

Efficient, real-time rendering of an output image is implemented using one or more input images and morph maps that include data defining characteristics of each pixel in the output image. The input images can include textures and other graphic data for a surface of an object. Any of a number of different known techniques are used to produce the data included in a morph map for rendering a scene. The morph map is implemented for a rectangular area M (x, y) and associates a set of M(x, y) data with each pixel position in the rectangular area, where j is a positive integer providing an index to one of the sets of pixel data associated with a pixel position. A set of up to seven parameters are included in the M(x, y) data for each pixel position. Using the morph map, a real-time rendering engine performs a transformation when the displayed scene must be modified in response to a user interaction or in response to some software program event. The real-time rendering engine combines the data in the morph maps and the different input images at a specific pixel position, producing an output value for the pixels that have changed. Only the changed pixels need to be recomputed and newly rendered in the output image. An indexing mechanism is used to minimize the computation load. Image morphing is accomplished by combining two warped images in a range, using either a constant blended value or a space-variant value.

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Bruno C Silva