Re: [PATCH] target: ppc: Correctly initialize HILE in HID-0 for book3s processors

[Vaibhav Jain]

Hi Fabiano,

Thanks for looking into this patch and apologies for the delayed reponse.
Fabiano Rosas <farosas@suse.de> writes:

> Narayana Murty N <nnmlinux@linux.ibm.com> writes:
>
>> On PPC64 the HILE(Hypervisor Interrupt Little Endian) bit in HID-0
>> register needs to be initialized as per isa 3.0b[1] section
>> 2.10. This bit gets copied to the MSR_LE when handling interrupts that
>> are handled in HV mode to establish the Endianess mode of the interrupt
>> handler.
>>
>> Qemu's ppc_interrupts_little_endian() depends on HILE to determine Host
>> endianness which is then used to determine the endianess of the guest dump.
>>
>
> Not quite. We use the interrupt endianness as a proxy to guest
> endianness to avoid reading MSR_LE at an inopportune moment when the
> guest is switching endianness.
Agreed

> This is not dependent on host
> endianness. The HILE check is used when taking a memory dump of a
> HV-capable machine such as the emulated powernv.

I think one concern which the patch tries to address is the guest memorydump 
file
generated of a BigEndian(BE) guest on a LittleEndian(LE) host is not readable on
the same LE host since 'crash' doesnt support cross endianess
dumps. Also even for a LE guest on LE host the memory dumps are marked as BE
making it not possible to analyze any guest memory dumps on the host.

However setting the HILE based on host endianess of qemu might not be
the right way to fix this problem. Based on an off mailing list discussion
with Narayana, he is working on another patch which doesnt set HILE
based on host endianess. However the problem seems to be stemming from
fact that qemu on KVM is using the HILE to set up the endianess of
memory-dump elf and since its not setup correctly the memory dumps are
in wrong endianess.

> I think the actual issue might be that we're calling
> ppc_interrupts_little_endian with hv=true for the dump.
>
Yes, that is currently the case with cpu_get_dump_info(). Excerpt from
that function below that sets the endianess of the dump:

    if (ppc_interrupts_little_endian(cpu, cpu->env.has_hv_mode)) {
        info->d_endian = ELFDATA2LSB;
    } else {
        info->d_endian = ELFDATA2MSB;
    }

for pseries kvm guest cpu->env.has_hv_mode is already set hence
ppc_interrupts_little_endian() assumes its running in 'hv' mode. The new
patch from Narayana will be addressing this.

>> Currently the HILE bit is never set in the HID0 register even if the
>> qemu is running in Little-Endian mode. This causes the guest dumps to be
>> always taken in Big-Endian byte ordering. A guest memory dump of a
>> Little-Endian guest running on Little-Endian qemu guest fails with the
>> crash tool as illustrated below:
>>
>
> Could you describe in more detail what is your setup? Specifically
> whether both guests are running TCG or KVM (info kvm) and the state of
> the nested-hv capability in QEMU command line.
Currently the issue is seen with any pseries KVM guest running on a PowerNV 
host.

-- 
Cheers
~ Vaibhav