A Guide to RISC Microprocessors / Register File Management

>"To manage the register windows, SPARC has three special instructions and two special registers. The instructions are SAVE. RESTORE, and RETT (return from trap). The registers are the CWP (current window pointer) and the W1M (window invalid mask).

The CWP serves the same purpose for the register windows that the stack pointer serves for memory-based stack frames.

The CWP determines which window is current (and, by implication, which windows are previous and next). The WIM determines which of the windows in the register file are "valid" or available. For the register windows scheme to function properly, there must always be one invalid window so that overflow and underflow can be detected. Overflow (trying to allocate a new window when the register file is "full") and underflow (trying to deallocate a window when the register file is "empty") can occur because there are only a few windows on-chip (typically seven or so) that are trying to contain an arbitrarily long run-time stack. By always having at least one window marked invalid, a program is guaranteed to bump into the invalid window as the CWP wraps around the circular window file. When a program tries to use the window marked as invalid, a hardware trap is taken to a routine that either flushes some of the register file contents to memory or restores some of the register file contents from memory.

In essence, only a portion of the top of the memory-based run-time stack is always contained in the register file. Another reason to always have one window marked invalid is to support fast trap processing. SPARC traps automatically decrement the CWP. In the case when all but one of the windows is valid, the trap-handling routine will be guaranteed free access to the window marked as invalid; there is no danger of the trap routine clobbering valid data in the register file. The RETT instruction automatically increments the CWP."