[PATCH v4 0/2] riscv: Introduce support for hardware break/watchpoints
Himanshu Chauhan
himanshu.chauhan at oss.qualcomm.com
Sun May 17 23:59:17 PDT 2026
This patchset adds support of hardware breakpoints and watchpoints in RISC-V
architecture. The framework is built on top of perf subsystem and SBI debug
trigger extension.
Currently following features are not supported and are in works:
- Ptrace support
- Single stepping
- Virtualization of debug triggers
The SBI debug trigger extension proposal can be found in Chapter-19 of SBI specification:
https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-sbi-doc/releases/download/v3.0/riscv-sbi.pdf
The Sdtrig ISA is part of RISC-V debug specification which can be found at:
https://github.com/riscv/riscv-debug-spec
Changes from v3:
- Rebased to v7.1-rc3.
- For watchpoints, check tdata1.hit via SBI_EXT_DBTR_TRIG_READ and
keep STVAL-based matching as fallback.
- Improved watchpoint matching when STVAL reports the lowest accessed
address for wider memory accesses.
- Program execute breakpoints with SIZE=0 (match any size) to avoid
misses with 16-bit/compressed instruction addresses.
- Updated RISCV selftest to avoid deadlock by replacing unbounded
sem_wait() with sem_timedwait() timeout handling.
- Updated RISCV selftest breakpoint function so it cannot be inlined
or optimized away.
Changes from v2:
- Rebased to v7.0-rc1
- Fixed the warnings from `checkpatch.pl --strict` run.
Changes from v1:
- The patch that adds the extension and the function IDs defined by the extension is
already merged. So this patch builds on top of that.
- Added breakpoint test application in self tests to test debug triggers
How to use:
~~~~~~~~~~~
OpenSBI:
https://github.com/riscv-software-src/opensbi.git
Qemu:
https://github.com/qemu/qemu.git
Linux Kernel:
You can pull v7.1-rc3 branch from Linus' Tree and apply these patches.
How to test:
~~~~~~~~~~~
>From the Linux kernel directory issue the following command:
make -C tools/testing/selftests/breakpoints/
This will make a binary named breakpoint_test_riscv under the same directory.
Load it on the machine and run. Sample output is given below:
/ # /apps/breakpoint_test_riscv
Breakpoint triggered!
Breakpoint test passed!
Watchpoint triggered!
Watchpoint test passed!
Himanshu Chauhan (2):
riscv: Introduce support for hardware break/watchpoints
riscv: Add breakpoint and watchpoint test for riscv
arch/riscv/Kconfig | 1 +
arch/riscv/include/asm/hw_breakpoint.h | 332 ++++++++
arch/riscv/include/asm/kdebug.h | 3 +-
arch/riscv/kernel/Makefile | 1 +
arch/riscv/kernel/hw_breakpoint.c | 736 ++++++++++++++++++
arch/riscv/kernel/traps.c | 6 +
tools/testing/selftests/breakpoints/Makefile | 5 +
.../breakpoints/breakpoint_test_riscv.c | 214 +++++
8 files changed, 1297 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
create mode 100644 arch/riscv/include/asm/hw_breakpoint.h
create mode 100644 arch/riscv/kernel/hw_breakpoint.c
create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/breakpoints/breakpoint_test_riscv.c
--
2.43.0
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