Re: [RFC PATCH v3 1/5] ppc64: Add semihosting support

[Nicholas Piggin]

Excerpts from Leandro Lupori's message of April 21, 2022 4:09 am:
> On 4/18/22 17:22, Cédric Le Goater wrote:
>> On 4/18/22 21:10, Leandro Lupori wrote:
>>> Add semihosting support for PPC64. This implementation is
>>> based on the standard for ARM semihosting version 2.0, as
>>> implemented by QEMU and documented in
>>>
>>>      https://github.com/ARM-software/abi-aa/releases
>>>
>>> The PPC64 specific differences are the following:
>>>
>>> Semihosting Trap Instruction: sc 7
>>> Operation Number Register: r3
>>> Parameter Register: r4
>>> Return Register: r3
>>> Data block field size: 64 bits
>> 
>> 'sc' is a good way to implement semi hosting but we should make sure
>> that it is not colliding with future extensions, at least with the
>> next POWERPC processor. Is that the case ? if not, then the lev could
>> be reserved.
>> 
> 
> Power ISA 3.1B says that LEV values greater that 2 are reserved.
> Level 2 is the ultravisor, so I assumed that level 7 was far enough from 
> current max level. I don't know if POWER11 will introduce new privilege 
> levels. Is this info publicly available somewhere? Or do you have a 
> better level in mind to use instead?

It's not available but there are no plans to use LEV=7.

It would be fine in practice I think, but it's kind of ugly and not 
great precedent -- how would we find out all the projects which use 
reserved instructions or values for something? Nominally the onus is on 
the software to accept breakage, but in reality important software that
breaks causes a headache for the ISA.

IBM's systemsim emulator actually has an instruction to call out to the 
emulator to do various things like IO. It uses the opcode

  .long 0x000eaeb0

That is the primary op 0 reserved space, and there is actually another 
op 'attn' or 'sp_attn' there which IBM CPUs implement, it is similar in 
spirit (it calls out to the service processor and/or chip error handling 
system to deal with a condition out-of-band). You don't want to use attn 
here because the core under emulation might implement it, I'm just 
noting the precedent with similar functionality under this primary 
opcode.

So I think the systemsim emulator instruction should be a good choice. 
But it should really be documented. I will bring this up at the Open 
Power ISA working group meeting next week and see what the options are 
with getting it formally allocated for semihosting emulators (or what 
the alternatives are).

Thanks,
Nick