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Re: Non-idempotent PMA and table walk accesses

David Kruckemyer
 

That sounds a bit like a performance counter to me, but it does raise an interesting question whether "idempotent" in the architectural sense is idempotent in a mathematical sense (i.e. operations are repeatable with the same result) or in a broader sense (e.g. inclusive of any side-effects even if the values at the location don't change).

I've always assumed the "non-idempotent" attribute meant that a read may not return the last value written or that repeated reads may not return the same value, not that the behavior included side-effects that are observable elsewhere. What is the consensus regarding this?

Cheers,
David


On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 4:16 PM Rishiyur Nikhil <nikhil@...> wrote:
Although I haven't seen any such implementation, I would imagine that a non-idempotent region that was, say, counting accesses to each address as a side-effect of each access may be a "benign" kind of non-idempotency for PTWs.

Nikhil

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 6:26 PM Andrew Waterman <andrew@...> wrote:


On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 2:58 PM David Kruckemyer <dkruckemyer@...> wrote:
Hi all,

I have a simple question: does the architecture allow table walk accesses (reads or writes) to regions with the non-idempotent PMA?

The architecture doesn't explicitly disallow it, so the answer is probably "yes." However, I'm having a hard time understanding a system design in which such a table walk would be practical. Can someone provide a practical use-case for walking non-idempotent locations?

If no such use-case exists, would people object to imposing a restriction on table walk accesses to locations with the non-idempotent PMA? Or at least a comment strongly suggesting that platforms won't support that behavior?

The specification machinery exists to allow implementations to impose such a restriction: "For systems with page-based virtual memory, I/O and memory regions can specify which combinations of hardware page-table reads and hardware page-table writes are supported."

I'd support adding a note that permitting page-table accesses to idempotent regions is discouraged.  Banning it seems a little harsh, though I see where you're coming from.


Cheers,
David
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