Tom Marchant wrote:
The Amdahl 580 series had the same sort of thing, but they called it
macrocode. It made it easy to implement new instructions. An
interrupt would cause a switch to "System state" and macrocode would
decide what to do with it. Macrocode, combined with increased
addressability and some novel channel architecture made it relatively
simple to implement XA.
MDF was implemented with a lot of special registers and macrocode to
perform the necessary setup.
Too bad I didn't keep my copy of the ALTA POO when I left the company...
It was also used to implement the original hypervisor ... which IBM
eventually had to respond to with PR/SM in 3090.
We used to talk about it at the monthly meetings at SLAC ... possibly
even talked about it before it was even announced. I also had discussed
some of my experiences having worked on ECPS for 138/148 ... a couple of
old ECPS postings
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#27 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#28 370 ECPS VM microcode assist
I have some vague recollection of one of the people who had done the
hypervisor implementation saying that they had hoped for better thruput
improvement based on my comments regarding ECPS.
various collecting postings discussing various microcode aspects (mostly
360 or 370)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360mcode
random past posts mentioning macrocode
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#44 Linux paging
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#48 Linux paging
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#9 Mainframe System
Programmer/Administrator market demand?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#56 Wild hardware idea
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#59 Misuse of word "microcode"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#60 Misuse of word "microcode"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#24 Description of a new
old-fashioned programming language
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#14 Multicores
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#29 Documentation for the New
Instructions for the z9 Processor
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#40 POWER6 on zSeries?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#43 POWER6 on zSeries?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#48 POWER6 on zSeries?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#38 blast from the past ... macrocode
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#9 Mainframe Jobs Going Away
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#32 Code density and performance?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#35 Code density and performance?
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