A mechanism for efficient context switching

Abstract
Context switches are slow in conventional processorsbecause the entire processor state must be savedand restored, even if much of the restored state is notused before the next context switch. This unnecessarydata movement is required because of the coarsegranularity of binding between names and registers.In this paper we introduce the Context Cache, whichbinds variable names to individual registers. This allowscontext switches to be very inexpensive, sinceregisters are only loaded and...

This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit: