Hi Mark,
On 4/14/20 9:05 PM, Mark Rutland wrote:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 03:39:56PM +1000, Gavin Shan wrote:
On 4/10/20 10:52 PM, Marc Zyngier wrote:
On 2020-04-10 09:58, Gavin Shan wrote:
In order to fulfil the control flow and convey signals between host
and guest. A IMPDEF system register (SYS_ASYNC_PF_EL1) is introduced.
The register accepts control block's physical address, plus requested
features. Also, the signal is sent using data abort with the specific
IMPDEF Data Fault Status Code (DFSC). The specific signal is stored
in the control block by host, to be consumed by guest.
- We don't add IMPDEF sysregs, period. That's reserved for the HW. If
you want to trap, there's the HVC instruction to that effect.
I really don't understand how IMPDEF sysreg is used by hardware vendors.
Do we have an existing functionality, which depends on IMPDEF sysreg?
I was thinking the IMPDEF sysreg can be used by software either, but
it seems I'm wrong.
The key is in the name: an IMPLEMENTATION DEFINED register is defined by
the implementation (i.e. the specific CPU microarchitecture), so it's
wrong for software to come up with an arbitrary semantic as this will
differ from the implementation's defined semantic for the register.
Typically, IMP DEF resgisters are used for things that firmware needs to
do (e.g. enter/exit coherency), or for bringup-time debug (e.g. poking
into TLB/cache internals), and are not usually intended for general
purpose software.
Linux generally avoids the use of IMP DEF registers, but does so in some
cases (e.g. for PMUs) after FW explicitly describes that those are safe
to access.
Thanks for the explanation and details, which make things much clear. Since
the IMPDEF system register can't be used like this way, hypercall (HVC) would
be considered to serve same purpose - deliver signals from host to guest. However,
the hypercall number and behaviors are guarded by specification. For example,
the hypercalls used by para-virtualized stolen time, which are defined in
include/linux/arm-smccc.h, are specified by ARM DEN0057A [1]. So I need a
specification to be created, where the hypercalls used by this feature are
defined? If it's not needed, can I pick hypercalls that aren't used and define
their behaviors by myself?
[1] http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.den0057a/DEN0057A_Paravirtualized_Time_for_Arm_based_Systems_v1_0.pdf
Another thing I want to check is about the ESR_EL1[DFSC]. In this series,
the asynchronous page fault is identified by IMPDEF DFSC (Data Fault Status
Code) in ESR_EL1. According to what we discussed, the IMPDEF DFSC shouldn't
be fired (produced) by software. It should be produced by hardware either?
What I understood is IMPDEF is hardware behavior. If this is true, I need
to avoid using IMPDEF DFSC in next revision :)
Thanks,
Gavin
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