logoalt Hacker News

lolsowrongtoday at 12:11 AM2 repliesview on HN

Most of the time. But sometimes, no. See ATL thunk emulation (last I checked, still alive in the windows kernel) and ntvdm handling of the BOP pseudoinstruction.

See also: Jazelle DBX.

Hell, on modern x86 processors, many “native” instructions are actually a series of micro-ops for a mostly undocumented and mostly poorly understood microcode architecture that differs from the natively documented instruction set.

It’s turtles all the way down.


Replies

fc417fc802today at 3:12 AM

Aren't all of them microcoded? Some years back root was achieved on a line of intel processors and new instructions implemented as proof of concept. There's an academic paper, citation not immediately to hand.

show 2 replies
saagarjhatoday at 1:01 AM

Jazelle and micro-ops are not interpreters, they are executed in hardware.

show 2 replies