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Chapter 17½ An Outline of the ICL 2900 Series System Architecture 259


event system is further improved by the provision of a primitive message passing facility (e.g. an indication of the success or failure of the peripheral request), thus creating a powerful mechanism for virtual machine synchronisation and communication.

There remains now the question of interrupt handling by the Kernel. Since we have defined the Kernel as a component of all process-images, it is evident that external interrupts will he accepted, and the initial decoding performed, in the currently active virtual machine. An attractive implementation of this is to treat interrupts as forced procedure calls, thus automatically storing the interrupted process state in the stack and at the same time creating a new working space for the interrupt routine. Unfortunately this solution runs into difficulties with interrupts whose purpose is to signify that there is no more space in main store at the top of the stack. Thus virtual store interrupts (and all interrupts of higher priority) are directed to a special stack known to the hardware, which, however, operates in all other respects like a normal stack.

 

Conclusion

The features of the 2900 Series system architecture described in this article are not peculiar to a particular model within the 2900 Series, but provide the basis at an architectural level for a compatible range of models, varying considerably in power and cost. This is achieved by means of two interfaces-the "Kernel Interface" which embodies the general architectural model, and the "Primitive Level Interface" which defines the instruction set and associated features. Neither of these interfaces can be regarded as a purely hardware interface, since the cost and power objectives of a particular model in the range will determine what is economic to implement as hardware, what as microprograms, what as software, etc.

The Kernel cannot he regarded as an operating system-it does not even provide a logical facility for communication between the operator and either the system or user programs-hut is rather a primitive layer of software which provides further levels of software (operating systems, data management systems, etc.) with a consistent abstraction of the architectural model, regardless of the implementation details of individual computers in the range. Thus the Kernel Interface guarantees to the higher levels of software that resources (whether hardware resources such as peripheral channels or software resources such as events) are handled in a uniform manner and within the virtual machine framework provided by the lower level.

The Primitive Level Interface corresponds approximately to a hardware instruction set, but like the Kernel Interface, its description does not imply its mode of implementation. Thus it is to be expected that for smaller models in the range some functions (e.g. floating point operations) might be implemented in the Kernel software. Similarly whilst the larger models will use special rapid storage locations to implement registers, at the lower end registers might be implemented in ordinary main store locations. The importance of these two interfaces is that taken together they create an abstract machine which provides an efficient and reliable environment for the compilation and execution of user programs written in high level languages.

 

References

Dijsktra [1968a]; Doran [1975]; Dorn [1974]; Keedy [1976]; Organick [1972]; Organick [1973].

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