On Tue, 2020-06-23 at 16:37 -0400, Jonathan Behrens wrote:
On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 5:42 PM Atish Patra <Atish.Patra@...> wrote:
On Jun 19, 2020, at 1:26 PM, Jonathan Behrens <behrensj@...> wrote:
Thanks for that clarification! It is good to know that SBI v0.1 implementations are consistent about returning negative values for functions they don't recognize like sbi_get_spec_version. This however doesn't work for environments which cannot or don't want to implement the SBI at all (what value do you return to say there is no SBI?)
Once RISC-V is more widely deployed, it is likely that there will be more platform specs written by other committees, or even groups entirely outside of the RISC-V foundation. They may not want to require ecalls to detect capabilities, or might have other constraints. Yet, developers will likely want to write kernels that can boot across a range of these different environments. This has certainly been the case on x86 where there's lots of different bootloaders that each work with their own conventions.
Yes. That’s a possibility. If I understand you correctly, you want some identifier that let supervisor know that the M-mode firmware is an SBI based one.
If that’s the only case, how about a DT property under /chosen node instead of reserving a register for a fixed value.
The register value would also signal the other elements of this platform spec are being followed. Notably including that a1 actually points to a valid device tree. If we could count on a device tree always being present then I agree that going the /chosen route would be cleaner, but if a future third party standard decided to go with ACPI tables or something instead then they may not be willing to require a dummy device tree just to allow software to blindly dereference a1.
For ACPI tables, a similar property can be added in the ACPI table. We anyways have to add other run time properties to ACPI table as we do currently for the device tree.
Jonathan
To give one case where this already seems to be coming up, Linux can run in M-mode instead of S-mode but only if it is configured that way at compile time. If Linux had a better way to know whether there was firmware present, it might be able to use a shared kernel binary for both cases.
Best, Jonathan
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 2:56 PM Atish Patra <Atish.Patra@...> wrote:
On Tue, 2020-06-16 at 09:54 -0400, Jonathan Behrens wrote:
Hi everyone,
To start off discussion about requirements that should go
into the
platform spec, I propose a simple change to current software:
When entering S-mode for the first time, the a2 register
should
contain the value 0x54414c5058494e55 ("UNIXPLAT").
The intention here is that software should be able to look
for this
value and know that it has been booted in a Supervisor
Execution
Environment that is compliant with the Unix-class platform
spec. This
would distinguish both from old implementations that only
support SBI
v0.1, but also possible future execution environments
designed by
other groups.
For SBI version, supervisor systems should use "sbi_get_spec_version" API to identify what is the SBI version of the SBI implementation. For v0.1, the above call will return a -ve value indicating that this is a v0.1.
That's how linux kernel currently detects the SBI version dynamically.
