公开(公告)号：US20210200551A1

公开(公告)日：2021-07-01

申请号：US16728722

申请日：2019-12-27

Applicant: Intel Corporation

Inventor： CARLOS ROZAS ,  FRANCIS MCKEEN ,  PASQUALE COCCHINI ,  MELTEM OZSOY ,  MATTHEW FERNANDEZ

IPC: G06F9/38 ,  G06F9/30 ,  G06F9/50

Abstract: An apparatus and method for tracking speculative execution flow and detecting potential vulnerabilities. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: an instruction fetcher to fetch instructions from a cache or system memory; a branch predictor to speculate a first instruction path to be taken comprising a first sequence of instructions; a decoder to decode the first sequence of instructions; execution circuitry to execute the first sequence of instructions and process data associated with the instruction to generate results; information flow tracking circuitry and/or logic to: assign labels to all or a plurality of instructions in the first sequence of instructions, track resource usage of the plurality of instructions using the labels, merge sets of labels to remove redundancies; and responsive to detecting that the first instruction path was mis-predicted, generating one or more summaries comprising resources affected by one or more of the first sequence of instructions; and recycling labels responsive to retirement of instructions associated with the labels.