[PATCH v1 0/5] RISC-V Hardware Probing User Interface

[Palmer Dabbelt]

These are very much up for discussion, as it's a pretty big new user
interface and it's quite a bit different from how we've historically
done things: this isn't just providing an ISA string to userspace, this
has its own format for providing information to userspace.

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 se
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.  I'm not really sure that's the
right way to go about this, but it makes for flexible prototying.
Various other approaches have been talked about like making HWCAP2 a
pointer, having a VDSO routine, or exposing this via sysfs.  Those seem
like generally reasonable approaches, but I've yet to figure out a way
to get the general case working without a syscall as that's the only way
I've come up with to deal with the heterogenous CPU case.  Happy to hear
if someone has a better idea, though, as I don't really want to add a
syscall if we can avoid it.

I threw this together during the conferences so I would be surprised if
it's not broken, but I figured it'd be best to just get something on the
lists sooner rather that later.  Happy to have someone go fix my code,
but the new uABI is really going to be the tricky bit here.  There's
some test code included, but I haven't even booted a kernel with these
patches so YMMV.

These are also up at kernel.org/palmer/linux/riscv-hwprobe-v1 in case
that's easier for folks.