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PALcode

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Guy Harris (talk | contribs) at 19:26, 10 September 2006 (Note that PALcode also handles TLB misses, and that it's Alpha machine code running in a special mode.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

In computing, on the DEC Alpha microprocessor, PALcode (Privileged Architecture Library code) is the name used by DEC for a set of functions in the SRM or AlphaBIOS firmware, providing a hardware abstraction layer for system software, covering features such as cache management, translation lookaside buffer (TLB) miss handling, interrupt handling and exception handling.

PALcode is Alpha machine code, running in a special mode that also allows access to internal registers specific to the particular Alpha processor implementation. It is thus somewhere between the role of microcode and of a hardware emulator.

PALcode is operating system-specific; different versions of PALcode are required by OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX, and Windows NT. Tru64 UNIX PALcode is also used by NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux.

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