Apple Inc.

Arm Limited

Jeffrey E Gonion

Mbou Eyole

Nigel John Stephens

Lior Zimet

Mridul Agarwal

Gideon N Levinsky

Richard F Russo

Tal Kuzi

Shih-Chieh Wen

Christopher M Tsay

Charles E Tucker

Filip J Pizlo

Michael D Snyder

Alex Klaiber

An interrupt delivery mechanism for a system includes and interrupt controller and a plurality of cluster interrupt controllers coupled to respective pluralities of processors in an embodiment. The interrupt controller may serially transmit an interrupt request to respective cluster interrupt controllers, which may acknowledge (Ack) or non-acknowledge (Nack) the interrupt based on attempting to deliver the interrupt to processors to which the cluster interrupt controller is coupled. In a soft iteration, the cluster interrupt controller may attempt to deliver the interrupt to processors that are powered on, without attempting to power on processors that are powered off. If the soft iteration does not result in an Ack response from one of the plurality of cluster interrupt controllers, a hard iteration may be performed in which the powered-off processors may be powered on.

Scalable interrupts

In an embodiment, dynamically-generated code may be supported in the system by ensuring that the code either remains executing within a predefined region of memory or exits to one of a set of valid exit addresses. Software embodiments are described in which the dynamically-generated code is scanned prior to permitting execution of the dynamically-generated code to ensure that various criteria are met including exclusion of certain disallowed instructions and control of branch target addresses. Hardware embodiments are described in which the dynamically-generated code is permitted to executed but is monitored to ensure that the execution criteria are met.

Hardware verification of dynamically generated code

Growing community of inventors

Campbell, CA, United States of America

Jeffrey E Gonion