Hardware and software methodologies for detecting illegal memory address of a memory access operation

Abstract

A system for providing bound checking to insure memory accessed, including indirect object access through pointers, is within a range of defined object bounds is disclosed herein. Embodiments of the present disclosure provide hardware and software methodology for bound checking, where bound checking is performed in hardware and in parallel with the execution of the memory accesses using dedicated hardware. There is reduced overhead associated with the enforcement of bound checking, and hardware is modified to include new registers and/or instructions for bound checking support. An exception is raised when an out of bound violation is detected. According to some embodiments, a compiler extracts bound information from the respective programming language (e.g. C/C++, Java) and generates tables with special APIs known to the hardware that enables both execution of the program and bound checking to be performed simultaneously.