Re: [PATCH v5 0/6] RISC-V Hardware Probing User Interface

[Heiko Stübner]

Am Montag, 27. März 2023, 18:31:57 CEST schrieb Evan Green:
> 
> There's been a bunch of off-list discussions about this, including at
> Plumbers.  The original plan was to do something involving providing an
> ISA string to userspace, but ISA strings just aren't sufficient for a
> stable ABI any more: in order to parse an ISA string users need the
> version of the specifications that the string is written to, the version
> of each extension (sometimes at a finer granularity than the RISC-V
> releases/versions encode), and the expected use case for the ISA string
> (ie, is it a U-mode or M-mode string).  That's a lot of complexity to
> try and keep ABI compatible and it's probably going to continue to grow,
> as even if there's no more complexity in the specifications we'll have
> to deal with the various ISA string parsing oddities that end up all
> over userspace.
> 
> Instead this patch set takes a very different approach and provides a set
> of key/value pairs that encode various bits about the system.  The big
> advantage here is that we can clearly define what these mean so we can
> ensure ABI stability, but it also allows us to encode information that's
> unlikely to ever appear in an ISA string (see the misaligned access
> performance, for example).  The resulting interface looks a lot like
> what arm64 and x86 do, and will hopefully fit well into something like
> ACPI in the future.
> 
> The actual user interface is a syscall, with a vDSO function in front of
> it. The vDSO function can answer some queries without a syscall at all,
> and falls back to the syscall for cases it doesn't have answers to.
> Currently we prepopulate it with an array of answers for all keys and
> a CPU set of "all CPUs". This can be adjusted as necessary to provide
> fast answers to the most common queries.
> 
> An example series in glibc exposing this syscall and using it in an
> ifunc selector for memcpy can be found at [1]. I'm about to send a v2
> of that series out that incorporates the vDSO function.
> 
> I was asked about the performance delta between this and something like
> sysfs. I created a small test program [2] and ran it on a Nezha D1
> Allwinner board. Doing each operation 100000 times and dividing, these
> operations take the following amount of time:
>  - open()+read()+close() of /sys/kernel/cpu_byteorder: 3.8us
>  - access("/sys/kernel/cpu_byteorder", R_OK): 1.3us
>  - riscv_hwprobe() vDSO and syscall: .0094us
>  - riscv_hwprobe() vDSO with no syscall: 0.0091us

Looks like this series spawned a thread on one of the riscv-lists [0].

As auxvals were mentioned in that thread, I was wondering what's the
difference between doing a new syscall vs. putting the keys + values as
architecture auxvec elements [1] ?

I'm probably missing some simple issue but from looking at that stuff
I fathom RISCV_HWPROBE_KEY_BASE_BEHAVIOR could also just be
AT_RISCV_BASE_BEHAVIOR ?


Heiko


[0] https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-toolchains/topic/97886491
[1] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/riscv/include/uapi/asm/auxvec.h