Hi Greg,

Thanks for the comments.

It seems the proposal is not explicit enough about the type of interrupt. So to answer your question, with vstimecmp, there is in fact a new type of interrupt types. The new type is triggered by vstimecmp but received when the hart is at V==0, might be called SGTI (Supervisor Guest Timer Interrupt, in the same spirit as SGEI). The proposal didn't really distinguish this interrupt with VSTI. With this new interrupt type, this is how things conceptually work: the HS-mode code first receives a SGTI triggered by vstimecmp, consequently, a VSTI is generated by the HS-mode code for VS-mode to handle.

With the current specs, hip.VSTIP is used to represent pending state for both VSTI and SGTI, which can be made to work as shown in the document. Since once SGTI is pending, then the next step is naturally to make a pending VSTI for the guest. What causes the issue is that the enable bits are also shared in existing specs. I believe your comments was caused by another shared aspect which is the delegation bits. The current specs only provide bit 2 in hideleg, which can't be used to control delegation for two types of interrupt.

A better solution might be to introduce a new interrupt type called SGTI and the corresponding pending bits and delegation bits. M-mode delegate SGTI to HS-mode. HS-mode still delegates VSTI to VS-mode. When an interrupt is triggered by vstimecmp, the hart sets SGTI to be pending and generates a trap. The hypervisor then sets VSTI to be pending, and executes the vCPU.

Hope this explains.

Regards,
Siqi