Research And Implementation Of Virtual Interrupt System In Multi-Core And Multi-Thread Processor

Interrupt system is an important component of modern computer system, for failure handling, real-time control, software debug, communication between processors and I/O devices all depend on it. With the development of computer software and hardware, the concept of interrupt is expending unceasingly, and the functional requirement of interrupt system in modern processor is also changing constantly. Interrupt system must go along with the development of processor architecture in order to promote the performance, especially when processors has entered the era of multi-core, multi-thread and virtualization.Base on virtual interrupt system in multi-core and multi-thread architecture, the aim of this study is to design and implement an interrupt system with virtualization features which supports multi-core architecture and multi-thread shared in X processor. As a part of the project on"High-Performance X Processor", the research is applied to practices directly.The paper researches the basic theory of virtualized interrupt system in multi-core and multi-thread architecture. It discusses the requirement of such an interrupt system, and sums up the possible solutions. Based on above research, it proposes the software interface and interrupt model of virtualized interrupt system, which is suitable for X processor with multi-core and multi-thread architecture. It also illustrates how to design the system with the use of a special floating point exception prediction mechanism to resolve the precise interrupt problem, and a synchronous instruction mechanism to reduce hardware costs and to cut down complexity of components interconnection. A verification scheme is raised for the interrupt component of X processor, following implementation and synthesizes. The results of the experiment show that the function of design is right and the performance meets the requirements of X processor.