Is it Possible to build a Processor which understands MSIL code.

[Henry Minute]

A games console with a stutter?

Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!

[Luc Pattyn]

No, an elephant doing a Groucho Marx joke. :)

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[Henry Minute]

I was actually referring to the PS...PS2 bit. :)

Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!

[Luc Pattyn]

and Jumbo, they used to sell puzzles around here (just like MB), and more. :)

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[Henry Minute]

Ah, not heard of that/them.

Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!

[Luc Pattyn]

FYI[^] :)

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[Rob Grainger]

Have you checked out Singularity at MS Research. It doesn't run MSIL natively, but is a completely CLR(ish) O/S, with many improvements. Very Radical. Singularity[^]

[peterchen]

Goooood questions. Modern processors decode opcodes into microcode when loading code into the CPU cache (at least, last time I checked. Those buggers change so fast!) That would be a decent place for optimizaitons, though I agree it's not fun to throw that away. But then, there are two things: - the code in the cache can be optimized to current calling conditions - optimizations independent of calling conditions can be written back to the in-memory code For the second, you need some "SystemLevel" code that allows unsafe operations, e.g. ILProcessor.Primitives.Out(portNumber, Value). It needs to be different from .NET's "unsafe" in that you can declare infection stoppage - i.e. "this class is a safe wrapper around its unsafe operations". Implementing the optimizations in hardware would probably be painfully stupid. However, the write-back-optimizations need to be done only once, and can be done in "native" code. State dependent on-the-fly optimizations could be done in a small "helper CPU" running some hardwired FORTRAN code.

FILETIME to time_t
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy

[Patrick Fox]

I think it would totally defeat the purpose. MSIL looks like assembly for a reason, because it's a simple way to specify RISC instructions. Those RISC-like instructions are translated into actual CPU instructions optimized for the CPU it's running on. If you want to change the way it optimizes, that means new hardware, as opposed to new software which is just bits. Microsoft is experimenting with an entirely managed OS, all code would have to be managed code, i.e. MSIL instructions. They call it Singularity (awesome name), it's one of their research projects. I think this is the better approach. GC is built on top of Windows memory management, but in singularity, GC is the memory management model. This is one of its major optimizations.

[P0110X]

it won't run java LoL

_class MySignature _{ __public override void toString() __{ ____return "hi ;)"; __} _}

[crazedDotNetDev]

Cool question… What about FPGAs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA[^]Just make sure the IL commands & assumed services are built and turn on the juice. However, I’d imagine you’d need an FPGA the size of which doesn’t exist to execute even the smallest app. Full disclosure: I’ve yet to work with FPGAs, so this idea might be trash. I’ve been drooling over them for a while. I can just imagine writing an app that translates into “circuitry”… then the headache comes when thinking about tracing & debugging.

[Daniel Grunwald]

Unlike Java bytecode; .NET IL is designed to be JIT-compiled, not interpreted. For example, .NET has only a single "add" instruction, which means integer addition or floating-point addition depending on the argument types. Also, each entry on the execution stack (always 32-bit for Java) can be arbitrarily large in .NET (as large as the largest struct). So you'll have a very hard time mapping that to hardware registers. For this reason, any .NET IL interpreter (whether hardware or software) would be highly inefficient. AFAIK even Mono's "mint" (the interpreter Mono uses on platforms for which they don't have a JIT compiler) does not interpret .NET IL directly, but first translates the IL into another intermediate language.

[Kirk Wood]

How would that work? Everyone would have to use the same encryption key and then everyone could decrypt the code leaving you with no protection.

[Kirk Wood]

I doubt that this would meet what you dream of, but there is the .NET Micro Framework. http://www.microsoft.com/netmf/default.mspx This gives you a small embedded processor which is programmed using the .NET Framework (or a portion of it). The micro controllers of today approach a system on a chip of yesterday. Many only need power to a couple pins to become workable and the remaining pins become inputs and outputs.

[Dave Kreskowiak]

I didn't say I knew how it would work. But I did say it would be nice if you didn't have to decrypt it to run it. Just a wild thought with no concern of how it would work or its implementation.

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[User 3405311]

Something a bit similar was done in in the 1980s with the Pascal MicroEngine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_MicroEngine

[Wesley Harris]

Or even better is the COSMOS project. They include a compiler to turn IL into ASM, but everything else is written in C#

[Wesley Harris]

Something to look at is the Netduino boards which use .Net micro to run .Net apps on them. See this post from Scott Hanselman for an intro. Netduino isn't the only board either...

[Spectre_001]

A few thoughts: First - The part you would want to build into the CPU would be the CLR - it's the part that interprets the MSIL code (same job as the bytecode interpreter in Java), creates the proper assembly level code for the machine to run and kicks it off. Second - Make the JIT compiler and framework dlls ROM based. Everything in .NET runs compiled to MSIL, including ASP.NET, the JIT is responsible for detecting that an ASP.NET file has changed since it was last run and recompiling it to MSIL. This is what gives you the capability of changing an ASP.NET page on the fly and having the newly saved version run next time the page is hit. Third - Same problem as someone else mentioned, you would be stuck using whatever version of the .NET Framework that was designed to use CLR that you have in the CPU and the JIT compiler and framework dlls in your ROM. The only way to upgrade your Framework version would be to upgrade your CPU and ROM chips. This also means that you would be prohibited from running any third party software that requires a different version of the .NET Framework. Requiring previous framework versions shouldn't be a problem as long as you stick to 2.0+, but anything that requires a newer version will not work. But then this is generally why they don't design the hardware to the OS, but the OS to the hardware. Well designed hardware should be capable of supporting more than 1 OS.

Kevin Rucker, Application Programmer QSS Group, Inc. United States Coast Guard OSC Kevin.D.Rucker@uscg.mil "Programming is an art form that fights back." -- Chad Hower

[vytheese]

Thanks for the Insight. From the scalable point I agree that hardware targeting a specific framework would not be posssible for a general PC. Probably it could fit for specific task like, middleware broker, Routing, Message Filters devices. For this purpose I got a reply from Kirk Wood about .Net MicroFramework. Managed OS could be the possible way for targeting a general PC. I got a reply in this same thread from Patrix Fox about a project called Singularity. Note: Don't know how to refer those previous link in this thread. Sorry for Innconvinience.

Regards, Vythees Miles to go before sleep...