On Wed, Jul 26 2023, Oliver Upton <oliver.upton@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Cornelia,
>
> On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 10:45:44AM +0200, Cornelia Huck wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 21 2023, Oliver Upton <oliver.upton@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > What I had in mind was something similar to the KVM_GET_ONE_REG ioctl,
>> > but instead of returning the register value it'd return the mask of the
>> > register. This would keep the kernel implementation dead simple (I'm
>> > lazy) and more easily allow for future expansion in case we want to
>> > start describing more registers this way. Userspace would iterate the ID
>> > register space and ask the kernel for the mask of registers it wants to
>> > change.
>>
>> Hm... for userspace it might be easier to get one big list and then
>> parse it afterwards? Similar to what GET_REG_LIST does today.
>
> Possibly, but I felt like it was a bit different from GET_REG_LIST since
> this would actually be a list of key-value pairs (reg_id, mask) instead
> of a pure enumeration of IDs. My worry is that if/when we wind up describing
> more registers in this list-based ioctl then userspace is going to wind
> up traversing that structure a lot to find the register masks it actually
> cares about.
Depends on how userspace actually digests it, but point taken.
>
>> Are you thinking more of a KVM_GET_REG_INFO or so ioctl, that could
>> support different kinds of extra info (and might also make sense for
>> other architectures?) If we end up with something more versatile, it
>> might make sense going that route.
>
> TBH, I hadn't considered the extensibililty of a per-register ioctl, but
> that does seem like a good point.
Maybe smth like
/* available with KVM_CAP_GET_REG_INFO */
struct kvm_reg_info {
__u64 id;
__u32 op;
__u32 len;
__u8 data[];
};
/* operations for kvm_reg_info->op */
#define KVM_REG_INFO_ARM_ID_REG 0
#define KVM_GET_REG_INFO _IOW(KVMIO, 0xd2, struct kvm_reg_info)
and returning sys_reg_desc->val in data if id points to a valid id reg.
