A Pipelined Multi-Core Machine with Operating System Support

Book excerpt: This work is building on results from the book named “A Pipelined Multi-core MIPS Machine: Hardware Implementation and Correctness” by M. Kovalev, S.M. Müller, and W.J. Paul, published as LNCS 9000 in 2014. It presents, at the gate level, construction and correctness proof of a multi-core machine with pipelined processors and extensive operating system support with the following features: • MIPS instruction set architecture (ISA) for application and for system programming • cache coherent memory system • store buffers in front of the data caches • interrupts and exceptions • memory management units (MMUs) • pipelined processors: the classical five-stage pipeline is extended by two pipeline stages for address translation • local interrupt controller (ICs) supporting inter-processor interrupts (IPIs) • I/O-interrupt controller and a disk