On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 6:29 PM Ved Shanbhogue <ved@...> wrote:
Should we keep this simple in the SBI - only have register based inputs - to send and receive 1 byte in each call?
Keeping it a simple out_byte or in_byte - a serial port like interface seems the simplest and most secure.
The legacy SBI v0.1 putchar() and getchar() are byte-level send/receive calls.
This is very slow for virtualized world particularly KVM RISC-V because each
SBI v0.1 putchar() or getchar() will trap to KVM RISC-V and KVM RISC-V will
forward it to user-space QEMU or KVMTOOL. This means each early print
character using SBI v0.1 putchar() will go all the way to host user-space and
come back. This is horribly slow for KVM Guest. This becomes further slower
for nested virtualization.
The MMIO based early prints are further worse because we have at least two
MMIO traps for every character where each MMIO exits to host user-space.
The shared memory based SBI puts() drastically reduces the number of SBI
traps hence reducing boot time with early prints enabled.
I worry about bugs/security issues that can be caused by M-mode firmware accessing strings in untrusted memory.
The VirtIO based para-virt devices rely heavily on shared memory so I think
it is possible to address security concerns related to shared memory.
The API as defined does not say whether the address is a virtual address or a physical address.
It is a physical address. I will clarify this in Draft v2.
If it is a virtual address then the SBI call will need to use a MPRV load/store to gather this data and will also need to deal with page fault, access faults, etc. that may occur on such accesses.
Yes, MPRV (or HLV/HSV) based load/store have performance issues
particularly due to page faults. These are prevalent in some of the
legacy SBI v0.1 calls. With SBI v0.2 (or higher), we have tried to
ensure that we don't use virtual addresses as parameter in newer SBI
calls.
Based on discussion it did not seem like it needs to be much fancier than this as this is for early OS/VMM code till it has enough functionality to directly interact with a uart.
The goal of the shared memory based SBI call for early prints is to
minimize the number of traps which in-turn helps virtualization to
drastically reduce boot-time.
Regards,
Anup
regards
ved
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 7:43 AM Anup Patel <apatel@...> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 2:58 PM Heiko Stübner <heiko@...> wrote:
Am Donnerstag, 2. Juni 2022, 10:50:56 CEST schrieb Heiko Stübner:
Am Donnerstag, 2. Juni 2022, 10:47:58 CEST schrieb Anup Patel:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 12:02 AM Heiko Stübner <heiko@...> wrote:
Hi Anup,
Am Mittwoch, 1. Juni 2022, 18:17:32 CEST schrieb Anup Patel:
Hi All,
Below is the draft proposal for SBI Debug Console Extension.
Please review it and provide feedback.
Thanks,
Anup
Debug Console Extension (EID #0x4442434E "DBCN")
================================================
The debug console extension defines a generic mechanism for boot-time
early prints from supervisor-mode software which allows users to catch
boot-time issues in supervisor-mode software.
This extension replaces legacy console putchar (EID #0x01) extension
and it is better in following ways:
1) It follows the new calling convention defined for SBI v1.0
(or higher).
2) It is based on a shared memory area between SBI implementation
and supervisor-mode software so multiple characters can be
printed using a single SBI call.
The supervisor-mode software must set the shared memory area before
printing characters on the debug console. Also, all HARTs share the
same shared memory area so only one HART needs to set it at boot-time.
Function: Set Console Area (FID #0)
-----------------------------------
struct sbiret sbi_debug_console_set_area(unsigned long addr_div_by_4,
unsigned long size)
Set the shared memory area specified by `addr_div_by_2` and `size`
typo in the "div_by_2" (not 4 like below and in the function itself) ?
parameters. The `addr_div_by_4` parameter is base address of the
shared memory area right shifted by 2 whereas `size` parameter is
the size of shared memory area in bytes.
The shared memory area should be normal cacheable memory for the
supervisor-mode software. Also, the shared memory area is global
across all HARTs so SBI implementation must ensure atomicity in
setting the shared memory area.
Errors:
SBI_SUCCESS - Shared memory area set successfully.
SBI_ERR_INVALID_ADDRESS - The shared memory area pointed by
`addr_div_by_2` and `size` parameters
is not normal cacheable memory or not
accessible to supervisor-mode software.
Function: Console Puts (FID #1)
-------------------------------
struct sbiret sbi_debug_console_puts(unsigned long area_offset,
unsigned long num_chars)
Print the string specified by `area_offset` and `num_chars` on
the debug console. The `area_offset` parameter is the start of
string in the shard memory area whereas `num_chars` parameter
is the number of characters (or bytes) in the string.
This is a blocking SBI call and will only return after printing
all characters of the string.
Errors:
SBI_SUCCESS - Characters printed successfully.
SBI_ERR_INVALID_ADDRESS - The start of the string (i.e.
`area_offset`) or end of the string
(i.e. `area_offset + num_chars`) is
outside shared memory area.
This will vastly reduce the number of needed ecalls when outputting
characters, so this will probably improve performance quite a bit :-)
I guess I still would like to have an _additional_ single-character
putc call. As mentioned in the other thread [0], especially on consumer
hardware [where there is no elaborate debug infrastructure] this can
be a very handy debugging tool even in the earliest stages of a
booting kernel (both before relocation and even inside the startup
assembly).
I.e. just doing a
li a7, 1
li a6, 0
li a0, 36
ecall
in any kernel assembly will just output a "$" character right now, without
needing any preparation at all - same with using the current
sbi_console_putchar() directly in c-code.
This _can_ be very helpful in some cases, so I guess it would be nice
to keep such a functionality around also in the new spec.
You can easily create multiple pre-populated strings using ".asciiz" in
assembly sources. Just set the base address of pre-populated strings
once on boot hart and print from anywhere using usual 4-5 instruction
(similar to what posted above).
ok, sounds like a plan as well :-)
though, how does that relate to the time before MMU setup?
I.e. in response to Heinrich's mail you talk about svpbmt, so I guess you
expect virtual memory there, so what is the expected value-type before
the mmu is setup in S-mode ?
The memory type should be 0 (i.e. PMA) for the shared memory between
SBI implementation and supervisor software. Before MMU setup, the
memory type is by default 0 (i.e. PMA) so we don't have to mandate
any memory type for MMU disabled case.
We only have issue on systems with Svpmbt where supervisor software
can potentially map the shared memory as non-cacheable or IO (memory
type != 0) using PTE memory type bits.
In addition to above, a SBI implementation must ensure that the shared
memory address provided by supervisor software is a regular memory
(not MMIO device). This can be easily achieved in OpenSBI, KVM RISC-V,
and various hypervisors.
Regards,
Anup
[0] http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/opensbi/2022-June/002796.html
Regards,
Anup
