Published Specifications – ISA 2.06
The Power Architecture Advisory Council announced in late January 2009 the availability of the Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) version 2.06. ISA 2.06 is a major specification designed to enable silicon SoC vendors to develop hardware partitioning that enable virtualization and hypervisor for the embedded Power Architecture market.
The specification is aimed at delivering major direct benefits: a) saving on development efforts and costs of software-based partitioning, b) improve on performance by eliminating emulation of privileged instruction execution on the host mode, and c) avoid complexity in modifying the Kernel. Thus, companies developing software partitioning for Power Architecture will result in higher costs, impact on performance and higher risk due to complexity added to the Kernel.
Implementing solution based on ISA 2.06 for hardware partitioning will naturally support virtualization and enable the development implementation of an efficient hypervisor.
As the specifications are being rolled-out, Freescale took a proactive strategy of implementing ISA 2.06 in the QorIQ Multicore program and also developed a thin layer of Hypervisor. Hypervisor is a software layer below the OS and enables creating partitions for multiple OSes and multiple CPUs in a secure environment where partitions are in total isolation of each other.
Among the enhancements documented in the 2.06 specification include major extensions, a new Vector-Scalar Floating-Point facility that supports vector and scalar floating-point operations, numerous new fixed-point, floating-point, and memory-management instructions, a new storage attribute, support for stronger storage access ordering, new storage control features, and many other enhancements. Extensions to the Embedded environment include an enhanced memory management architecture, logical partitioning and hypervisor support, embedded page table support, and multi-threading.
The 1336 Page document is compromised of five books and a set of appendices.
ISA 2.06 documentation is now available
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