D.7. State Management Registers
Some combination of hardware and software must manage all sorts of state transitions in a system, including those related to function calling at the level of application programming and those related to the management of threads, processes, and interrupts.
In general, memory stacks are usually chosen as the means of preserving information about a prior state for restoration later. The Itanium architecture can preserve one level of prior state information in hardware in the application register called ar.pfs (previous function state register), whose general structure is as follows:
where ppl is the previous value ...
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