Processor with register stack engine that dynamically spills/fills physical registers to backing store

摘要

According to an embodiment of the invention, a processor comprises a register file and a register stack engine. The register file has a predetermined size and a set of registers in the register file is allocated when a function in a code sequence is called. The register stack engine saves the contents of a set of registers in a reserve storage area responsive to a function call if the function call would overflow the predetermined size of the register file. The register stack engine restores data from the reserve storage area to the register file if a recursive function call occurs.