Importance

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Abstract

Each process in a multi-process computing system using so-called capabilities may have associated with it a process dumpstack protected by the capability mechanism. The functions of this dumpstack are (i) to provide the state of the process at the point at which it was suspended and (ii) to stack (or nest) information relating to the invoked procedures (i.e. sub-routines) of the process. Thus there is a fixed sized portion containing principally the machine registers, the indicators and the watchdog timer values and a variable sized portion containing information related to each nested procedure. Each stack link is of fixed size and contains three items:- relativized instruction address, the code block capability and process capability pointer list block capability. This arrangement is enhanced to allow two additional classes of information to be stored in each link namely (a) an indication of the data and capability registers preserved during the domain change procedure and (b) descriptors for local storage segments. The use of descriptors for local storage allows a pool of storage particular to the process to be allocated on a segmented basis.

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First Claim