Supporting object accesses in a Java processor

Due to Java's object-based nature and support for garbage collection, effic ient object manipulation and relocation are critical to the execution speed of Java code. Java Virtual Machine implementations that utilise handle rep resentation such as Sun's Java Development Kit 1.1 enable efficient object relocation at the cost of an additional indirection for each object access. The direct address object representations such as those used in CACAO and NET compiler eliminate the indirection overhead, but update during object r elocation is complex. A virtual address object cache that reduces the indir ection overhead while maintaining the efficiency of object relocation is pr oposed. The objects in the virtual address cache are addressed directly usi ng the object reference and field offset pair. This eliminates the indirect ion overhead and off-set addition overhead associated with the handle repre sentation model. A hardware object table that maintains the handles is used to obtain the actual object location on a virtual address cache miss. The performance of the virtual address cache is analysed using various Java pro grams, and is found to reduce 1.5 cycles per object access on an average as compared to the handle representation model for the various benchmarks stu died.