Automatic Checking of Instruction Specifications

Abstract

Mary Fernandez AT&T Labs 600 Mountain Ave. Murray Hill, NJ 07974 mff@research.att.com Retargeting applications that process machine code is a tedious and error-prone task. We help automate retargeting by describing instruction sets in a high-level specification language and by generating automatically the code for encoding and decoding instructions. Moreover, we provide automated assistance for checking machine descriptions. We check a specification for consistency both internally and externally. Internal checking forbids impossible instruction specifications, e.g., those that specify two values for a single bit. Internal checking warns about implausible specifications, e.g., those that don't specify values for all bits. Internal checks catch many mistakes, but they cannot guarantee that a specification accurately describes a target machine. Externally, we check a specification for consistency with an independent assembler. This technique increases a user's confidence in a specification's correctness and permits debugging in isolation of the target application. External validation is effective: it identified errors in specifications of the Intel Pentium, the MIPS, and the SPARC, after code generated from the latter two had been used in applications for over a year.