Paper Details

%T tranx86 \-\- An Optimising ETC to IA32 Translator
%A Frederick R. M. Barnes
%E Alan G. Chalmers, Majid Mirmehdi, Henk Muller
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2001
%X This paper describes tranx86, a program which converts
   Extended Transputer Code (ETC) from a modified Inmos occam
   compiler, into IA32 code for execution on the Intel i386
   family of processors within the KRoC/Linux system. Several
   optimisations are employed in an attempt to maximise
   performance on this family of processors, including
   optimisations in the CCSP run\-time kernel. These include a
   graph\-colouring type register allocation scheme and various
   inlining of code. While tranx86 is mostly architecture
   dependent, effort has been made to allow the use of
   arbitrary schedulers, although currently CCSP is the only
   fully supported one. Various benchmark programs are used to
   compare the performance of this translator with the old
   system, giving significant time wins in some cases. For the
   commstime benchmark program on an 800 MHz Pentium\-3, the
   old KRoC/Linux system gave 233 ns per communication (2
   context switches); the new one, with optimisations and
   inlining, gives 67 ns per communication \-\- more than a
   3\-fold reduction in overheads.

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