Article

Understanding and improving operating system effects in control flow prediction

Authors:

Lizy Kurian John,

Anand Sivasubramaniam,

N. Vijaykrishnan,

Juan RubioAuthors Info & Claims

ASPLOS X: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

Pages 68 - 80

https://doi.org/10.1145/605397.605405

Published: 01 October 2002 Publication History

Abstract

Many modern applications result in a significant operating system (OS) component. The OS component has several implications including affecting the control flow transfer in the execution environment. This paper focuses on understanding the operating system effects on control flow transfer and prediction, and designing architectural support to alleviate the bottlenecks. We characterize the control flow transfer of several emerging applications on a commercial operating system. We find that the exception-driven, intermittent invocation of OS code and the user/OS branch history interference increase the misprediction in both user and kernel code.We propose two simple OS-aware control flow prediction techniques to alleviate the destructive impact of user/OS branch interference. The first one consists of capturing separate branch correlation information for user and kernel code. The second one involves using separate branch prediction tables for user and kernel code. We study the improvement contributed by the OS-aware prediction to various branch predictors ranging from simple Gshare to more elegant Agree, Multi-Hybrid and Bi-Mode predictors. On 32K entries predictors, incorporating OS-aware techniques yields up to 34%, 23%, 27% and 9% prediction accuracy improvement in Gshare, Multi-Hybrid, Agree and Bi-Mode predictors, resulting in up to 8% execution speedup.

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Understanding and improving operating system effects in control flow prediction
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Understanding and improving operating system effects in control flow prediction

Many modern applications result in a significant operating system (OS) component. The OS component has several implications including affecting the control flow transfer in the execution environment. This paper focuses on understanding the operating ...
Understanding and improving operating system effects in control flow prediction

Many modern applications result in a significant operating system (OS) component. The OS component has several implications including affecting the control flow transfer in the execution environment. This paper focuses on understanding the operating ...
Understanding and improving operating system effects in control flow prediction
Special Issue: Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Many modern applications result in a significant operating system (OS) component. The OS component has several implications including affecting the control flow transfer in the execution environment. This paper focuses on understanding the operating ...

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cover image ACM Conferences

ASPLOS X: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

October 2002

318 pages

ISBN:1581135742

DOI:10.1145/605397

Conference Chair:
Kourosh Gharachorloo
Compaq Western Research Lab
,
Program Chair:
David A. Wood

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 30, Issue 5
Special Issue: Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
December 2002
296 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/635506
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ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 36, Issue 5
December 2002
296 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/635508
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ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 37, Issue 10
October 2002
296 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/605432
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Published: 01 October 2002

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Sun BLi XWang CWan BZhou X(2016)KUMMSInternational Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture10.1504/IJHPSA.2016.0762026:1(13-27)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2016
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Huang MHe DLiu XTan MCheng X(2015)An Energy-Efficient Branch Prediction with Grouped Global HistoryProceedings of the 2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP)10.1109/ICPP.2015.23(140-149)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPP.2015.23
Watfa MMoubarak M(2014)A Benchmarking Tool for Wireless Sensor Network Embedded Operating SystemsJournal of Networks10.4304/jnw.9.8.1971-19849:8Online publication date: 7-Aug-2014
https://doi.org/10.4304/jnw.9.8.1971-1984
Fang ZZhao LJiang XLu SIyer RLi TLee SShanbhag NPoncino MChou PAmerasekera A(2012)Reducing L1 caches power by exploiting software semanticsProceedings of the 2012 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Low power electronics and design10.1145/2333660.2333750(391-396)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2012
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Soares LStumm MArpaci-Dusseau RChen B(2010)FlexSCProceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation10.5555/1924943.1924946(33-46)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2010
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Wells PChakraborty KSohi G(2009)Dynamic heterogeneity and the need for multicore virtualizationACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/1531793.153179743:2(5-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2009
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Li TJohn LSivasubramaniam AVijaykrishnan NRubio J(2007)OS-Aware Branch PredictionIEEE Transactions on Computers10.5555/1191544.119170556:1(2-17)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2007
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Li TJohn LSivasubramaniam AVijaykrishnan NRubio J(2007)OS-Aware Branch Prediction: Improving Microprocessor Control Flow Prediction for Operating SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2007.25061956:1(2-17)Online publication date: Jan-2007
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