EXTERNAL MAIL

Here's a question for the group: I did in as a picture... hopefully it will go through the mailing list:

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 4:56 PM David Horner <ds2horner@...> wrote:

On 2020-10-16 10:30 a.m., krste@... wrote:
>
>>>>>> On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 07:48:00 -0400, "David Horner" <ds2horner@...> said:
> | First I am very happy that "arbitrary decisions by the
> | micro-architecture" allow reduction of vl to any [non-zero] value.
>
> | Even if such appear "random".
> [...]
> | A check for vl=0 on platforms that allow it is eminently doable, low
> | overhead for many use cases  AND guarantees forward progress under
> | SOFTWARE control.
>
> If we allowed implementation to return vl=0, how does software
> guarantee forward progress?

The forward progress is to advance to another task.

In the case of machine mode it can potentially "resolve" the cause of
the vl=0 return and re-execute the loop (without the overhead of the trap).


>
> | I see it as no different [in fundamental principle] than other cases
> | such as RVI integer divide by zero behaviour that does not trap but can
> | be  readily checked for.
> | Also RVI integer overflow that if you want to check for it is at most a
> | few instructions including the branch.
>
> I don't see how these examples relate to returning vl=0 on some
> microarchitectural event.  The examples here have results that depend
> only on architectural values, so can be deterministically handled.
The similarity is the avoidance of trap handling, when it is sufficient
to check instead register state.
>
> vl=0 is more related to load-reserved/store-conditional failure, where
> we need to add implementation constraints to guarantee forward
> progress.

Ok. I can see providing guidance as to when vl=0 is allowed, but not to
exclude it outright.


> Krste