Re: RISC-V H-extension freeze consideration
andrew@...
I’m not in support of freezing it yet. My concern is that development of virtualization-aware interrupt controllers and IOMMUs will lead to reconsideration of some of the details. All of these items are logically interlocking, even if physically disjoint separate. It’s entirely possible that we will make no changes as a result of that further development, but it’s far from certain.
Furthermore, the hypervisor extension is of substantially greater with those other items completed, so we aren’t losing out as much as it might seem by postponing the freeze.
On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 7:47 PM Anup Patel <Anup.Patel@...> wrote:
Hi All,
The RISC-V H-extension v0.6.1 draft was released almost a year back in
May 2020. There has been no changes in the H-extension specification
since then.
Meanwhile, we have RISC-V H-extension v0.6.1 implemented in QEMU,
Spike, and Rocket FPGA. We also have three different hypervisors ported
to RISC-V H-extension v0.6.1:
1. Xvisor RISC-V (Works on QEMU, Spike, and Rocket FPGA)
2. KVM RISC-V (Works on QEMU, Spike and Rocket FPGA)
3. Bao (Works on Rocket FPGA)
Unfortunately, RISC-V H-extension not being in freeze state is now gating
further software development because major open source projects (such
as Linux RISC-V and GCC RISC-V) have adopted a policy of accepting patches
only for frozen or ratified RISC-V extensions.
Few examples of gated software development:
1. KVM RISC-V not merged in upstream Linux RISC-V. The KVM RISC-V
patches are already reviewed and acked by maintainers in July 2019.
Currently, we are rebasing KVM RISC-V patches with every kernel
release since 1.5+ years.
2. GCC RISC-V not accepting patches for H-extension related instructions
3. KVMTOOL RISC-V not merged because KVM RISC-V is not merged in
upstream Linux RISC-V
4. QEMU KVM RISC-V acceleration not merged because KVM RISC-V is
not merged in upstream Linux RISC-V
5. Various feature additions (such as SBI v0.2, nested, etc) can't happen
(or can't be merged) until KVM RISC-V is merged in Linux RISC-V
6. Libvirt library blocked on QEMU KVM RISC-V acceleration being
available. The Libvirt library is a crucial piece in open-source cloud
solutions (such as open-stack).
7. As time passes more items (such as KVM RISC-V AIA support) will
get blocked if KVM RISC-V is not merged upstream.
We would request the TSC to consider freezing RISC-V H-extension v0.6.1
draft specification. Remaining items in done checklist for ratification can
certainly be completed while H-extension is in the frozen state.
Best Regards,
Anup Patel