Threads/Coroutines

This is discussed, at least briefly, here: http://millcomputing.com/topic/the-belt/. The description starts at slide 40, at 00:30:46 in the video.

In short, the state is saved/restored by a hardware mechanism. All the metadata is saved/restored with it.

The “call stack” on a Mill is not the same as on a conventional. On a Mill, data that is not part of programmer visible state (such as function or interrupt return address) is saved/restored by the spiller hardware, and if enough levels of interrupt and/or function call occur to push this data to main memory, it is pushed to a completely different memory block. Normally, except for debugging, this “saved state” region is protected from all access except by the spiller hardware. The programmer visible “call stack” (such as C automatic local function variables) on a Mill is in a memory privilege region containing only programmer visible variables.

This same spiller hardware mechanism is used by the OS to change thread contexts. How something like Unix fork is handled is NYF, and I will defer to Ivan to explain that when it is.