Thursday, 4 December 2014

The Sun UltraSPARC processor has multiple register sets. Describe the actions of a context switch if the new context is already loaded into one of the register sets. What else must happen if the new context is in memory rather than in a register set and all the register sets are in use?

The CPU current-register-set pointer is changed to point to the set containing the new context, which takes very little time. If the context is in memory, one of the contexts in a register set must be chosen and be moved to memory, and the new context must be loaded from memory into the set. This process takes a little more time than on systems with one set of registers, depending on how a replacement victim is selected.

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