Re: [PATCH 0/7] Add support to handle misaligned accesses in S-mode

[Clément Léger]

On 02/10/2023 12:49, Conor Dooley wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 02, 2023 at 09:40:04AM +0200, Clément Léger wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 30/09/2023 11:23, Conor Dooley wrote:
>>> On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 05:03:09PM +0200, Clément Léger wrote:
>>>> Since commit 61cadb9 ("Provide new description of misaligned load/store
>>>> behavior compatible with privileged architecture.") in the RISC-V ISA
>>>> manual, it is stated that misaligned load/store might not be supported.
>>>> However, the RISC-V kernel uABI describes that misaligned accesses are
>>>> supported. In order to support that, this series adds support for S-mode
>>>> handling of misaligned accesses as well support for prctl(PR_UNALIGN).
>>>>
>>>> Handling misaligned access in kernel allows for a finer grain control
>>>> of the misaligned accesses behavior, and thanks to the prctl call, can
>>>> allow disabling misaligned access emulation to generate SIGBUS. User
>>>> space can then optimize its software by removing such access based on
>>>> SIGBUS generation.
>>>>
>>>> Currently, this series is useful for people that uses a SBI that does
>>>> not handled misaligned traps. In a near future, this series will make
>>>> use a SBI extension [1] allowing to request delegation of the
>>>> misaligned load/store traps to the S-mode software. This extension has
>>>> been submitted for review to the riscv tech-prs group. An OpenSBI
>>>> implementation for this spec is available at [2].
>>>>
>>>> This series can be tested using the spike simulator [3] and an openSBI
>>>> version [4] which allows to always delegate misaligned load/store to
>>>> S-mode.
>>>
>>> Some patches in this series do not build for any configs, some are
>>> broken for clang builds and others are broken for nommu. Please try to> build test this more thoroughly before you submit the next version.
>>
>> Hi Conor,
>>
>> Thanks for the feedback, I'll check that.
>>
>>>
>>> Also, AIUI, this series should be marked RFC since the SBI extension
>>> this relies on has not been frozen.
>>
>> This series does not actually uses the SBI extension but provides a way
>> to detect if misaligned accesses are not handled by hardware nor by the
>> SBI. It has been reported by Ron & Daniel they they have a minimal SBI
>> implementation that does not handle misaligned accesses and that they
>> would like to make use of the PR_SET_UNALIGN feature. This is what this
>> series addresses (and thus does not depend on the mentioned SBI extension).
> 
> Ah, I must have misread then. Apologies.

No worries, maybe I should actually remove this from the cover letter to
avoid any confusion !

Clément