[PATCH] riscv: Add sysctl to control discard of vstate during syscall
Drew Fustini
pdp7pdp7 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 21 14:20:03 PDT 2025
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 04:54:25PM +0200, Radim Krčmář wrote:
> 2025-07-21T14:35:38+02:00, Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar at ventanamicro.com>:
> > Shouldn't the RISC-V Linux syscall ABI be defined somewhere?
>
> To clarify this point. My issue is with the following part in
> Documentation/arch/riscv/vector.rst:
>
> >> As indicated by version 1.0 of the V extension [1], vector registers are
> >> clobbered by system calls.
> >> [...]
> >> 1: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec/blob/master/calling-convention.adoc
>
> The ISA does not say that vector registers are clobbered by system
> calls. All the ISA says is:
>
> "This Appendix is only a placeholder to help explain the conventions
> used in the code examples, and is not considered frozen or
> part of the ratification process. The official RISC-V psABI document
> is being expanded to specify the vector calling conventions."
>
> while the RISC-V psABI says:
>
> "The calling convention for system calls does not fall within the
> scope of this document. Please refer to the documentation of the
> RISC-V execution environment interface (e.g OS kernel ABI, SBI)."
>
> We made a circular dependency, misinterpreted the ISA, and probably
> implemented a suboptimal syscall ABI -- preserving vector registers
> seems strictly better.
Thanks for providing these references. It does seem like this is
something that an OS can decide and is not mandated by the ISA or psABI.
> > How come we could have broken it with 9657e9b7d253?
>
> We changed the ABI once, so maybe we can change it back?
Reverting 9657e9b7d253 would solve the performance issue for some
implementations that I've highlighted in this patch. However, I am
interested to hear from others that feel the current mandatory
clobbering behavior is ideal for testing (and maybe security?).
Thanks,
Drew
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