[PATCH v2 2/6] RISC-V: Add a syscall for HW probing

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023, at 23:43, Jessica Clarke wrote:
> On 15 Feb 2023, at 21:14, Evan Green <evan at rivosinc.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 1:57 AM Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de> wrote:
>> Palmer can probably speak to this with more authority, but my
>> understanding about the motivation for an approach like this goes
>> something like:
>> * With the nature of RISC-V, we expect a lot of these types of bits
>> and bobs, many more than we've seen with the likes of x86 and ARM.
>
> We’re already at (I think) 51 standard user-level extensions that LLVM
> knows about.

Do you have an estimate of how many of these require kernel support
beyond identifying the extensions?

>> * We also expect in some cases these values to be inconsistent across CPUs.
>
> That’s also true of some Arm SoCs.

Right, but it's also something that we should not encourage, or
need to make easy to use. On arm64, the kernel support for having
asymmetric aarch32 mode was kept to an absolute minimum, and an
application is expected to get the information from /proc/cpuinfo
before pinning down a task to the correct subset of all CPUs.

>> * So, a syscall with a vDSO function in front of it seemed like a
>> good combination of speed and flexibility.
>> 
>> You're certainly right that HWCAPn would work for what we're exposing
>> today, so the question probably comes down to our relative predictions
>> of how this data will grow.
>
> The other big problem is vendor extensions.

My biggest concern is how this would be synchronized between the
interfaces that are available to users. What we have on other architectures
is a set of string identifiers in /proc/cpuinfo and a bitmask in HWCAP.
Ideally these are added in pairs so the information available to shell
scripts in human readers is the same that is available in the auxvec
data.

Adding a third interface with the same information or a superset
requires more work in ensuring that each extension is available
in exactly the right places. Ideally I think there should be only
one table of possible CPU features so nobody has to make the
decision about which ones are important enough to add to one
interface or another.

     Arnd