CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cpu-architectureinstruction-set
user6529117
user6529117

Reputation:

Do instruction sets like x86 get updated? If so, how is backwards compatibility guaranteed?

How would an older processor know how to decode new instructions it doesn't know about?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 180

Answers (2)

Peter Cordes
Peter Cordes

Reputation: 363980

New instructions use previously-unused opcodes, or other ways to find more "coding space" (e.g. prefixes that didn't previously mean anything for a given opcode).

How would an older processor know how to decode new instructions it doesn't know about?

It won't. A binary that wants to work on old CPUs as well as new ones has to either limit itself to a baseline feature set, or detect CPU features at run-time and set function pointers to select versions of a few important functions. (aka "runtime dispatching".)

x86 has a good mechanism (the cpuid instruction) for letting code query CPU features without any kernel support needed. Some other ISAs need CPU info hard-coded into the OS or detected via I/O accesses so the only viable method is for the kernel to export info to user-space in an OS-specific way.

Or if you're building from source on a machine with a newer CPU and don't care about old CPUs, you can use gcc -O3 -march=native to let GCC use all the ISA extensions the current CPU supports, making a binary that will fault on old CPUs. (e.g. x86 #UD (UnDefined instruction) hardware exception, resulting in the OS delivering a SIGILL or equivalent to the process.)

Or in some cases, a new instruction may decode as something else on old CPUs, e.g. x86 lzcnt decodes as bsr with an ignored REP prefix on older CPUs, because x86 has basically no unused opcodes left (in 32-bit mode). Sometimes this "decode as something else" is actually useful as a graceful fallback to allow transparent use of new instructions, notably pause = rep nop = nop on old CPUs that don't know about it. So code can use it in spin loops without checking CPUID.

-march=native is common for servers where you're setting things up to just run on that server, not making a binary to distribute.

Upvotes: 2

Alex Guteniev
Alex Guteniev

Reputation: 13634

Most of the times, old processor will have "Undefined Instruction" exception. The instruction is not defined in old CPU.

In more rare cases, the instruction will execute as a different instruction. This happens when then new instruction is encoded via obligatory prefix. As an example, PAUSE is encoded as REP NOP, so it executed as nothing on older CPUs.

Upvotes: 1

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