Speculative execution exception recovery using write-back suppression

Abstract

Compiler-controlled speculative execution has been shown to be effective in increasing the available instruction level parallelism (ILP) found in non-numeric programs. An important problem associated with compiler-controlled speculative execution is to accurately report and handle exceptions caused by speculatively executed instructions. Previous solutions to this problem incur either excessive hardware overhead or significant register pressure. The paper introduces a new architectural scheme referred to as write-back suppression. This scheme systematically suppresses register file updates for subsequent speculative instructions after an exception condition is detected for a speculatively executed instruction. The authors show that with a modest amount of hardware, write-back suppression supports accurate reporting and handling of exceptions for compiler-controlled speculative execution with minimal additional register pressure. Experiments based on a prototype compiler implementation and hardware simulation indicate that ensuring accurate handling of exceptions with write-back suppression incurs little run-time performance overhead. >