Patent · US Expired

Enhanced stack unwind facility

US6014515A · kind A · utility

16Cited by
2References
33Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventor

Key dates

Filing dateMay 29, 1997
Grant dateJan 11, 2000
Priority date
Expiry dateMay 29, 2017

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F9/4812
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

An enhanced unwind facility is more extensible, much faster, and uses smaller tables than presently known schemes. In broad terms, the unwind facility trades bytes that are used for addresses and region lengths in known schemes for a stream of bit fields parallel to the instruction stream. This arrangement allows an unwind library to compute a current regions' attributes by indexing instead of by a binary search. This arrangement also leads to an extensible design that does not require significant effort on an occurrence-by-occurrence basis in both the linker and the unwind library when additional services are required, e.g. register use areas for the debugging of optimized code.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.