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Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs
From: |
Christoffer Dall |
Subject: |
Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs |
Date: |
Tue, 28 Jan 2014 08:31:04 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) |
On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 03:47:32PM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Mon, 2014-01-27 at 16:44 -0800, Christoffer Dall wrote:
>
> > I'm loosing track of this discussion, Ben, can you explain a bit? You
> > wrote:
> >
> > Having a byte array coming in that represents what the CPU does in its
> > current byte order means you do *NOT* need to query the endianness of
> > the guest CPU from userspace.
> >
> > What does "a byte array that represents what the CPU does in its current
> > byte order" mean in this context. Do you mean the VCPU or the physical
> > CPU when you say CPU.
>
> It doesn't matter once it's a byte array in address order. Again this is
> the *right* abstraction for the kernel ABI, because you do not care
> about the endianness of either side, guest or host.
>
> It makes no sense to treat a modern CPU data bus as having an MSB and an
> LSB (even if they have it sometimes on the block diagram). Only when
> *interpreting a value* on that bus, such as an *address* does the
> endianness become of use.
>
> Treat the bus instead as an ordered sequence of bytes in ascending
> address order and most of the complexity goes away.
>
> From there, for a given device, it all depends which bytes *that device*
> choses to consider as being the MSB vs. LSB. It's not even a bus thing,
> though of course some busses suggest an endianness, and some like PCI
> mandates it for configuration space.
>
> But it remains a device-side choice.
>
> > I read your text as saying "just do a store of the register into the
> > data pointer and don't worry about endianness", but somebody, somewhere,
> > has to check the VCPU endianness setting.
> >
> > I'm probably wrong, and you are probably the right person to clear this
> > up, but can you formulate exactly what you think the KVM ABI is and how
> > you would put it in Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt?
> >
> > My point of view is that it is KVM that needs to do this, and it should
> > "emulate the CPU" by performing a byteswap in the case where the CPU
> > E-bit is set on ARM, but this is an ARM-centric way of looking at
> > things.
>
> The ABI going to qemu should be (and inside qemu from TCG to the
> emulation) that the CPU did an access of N bytes wide at address A
> whose value is the byte array data[] in ascending address order.
>
OK, I've sent a v3 of the ABI clarification patch following the wording
from you and Scott. I think we all agree what the format should look
like at this point and hopefully we can quickly agree about a text to
describe that.
Thanks,
-Christoffer
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, (continued)
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Christoffer Dall, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Victor Kamensky, 2014/01/23
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Peter Maydell, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Christoffer Dall, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs,
Christoffer Dall <=
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Benjamin Herrenschmidt, 2014/01/27
- Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-ppc] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Avi Kivity, 2014/01/28
- Re: [Qemu-devel] KVM and variable-endianness guest CPUs, Avi Kivity, 2014/01/28