qemu-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Qemu-devel] RISC-V: Vector && DSP Extension


From: liuzhiwei
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] RISC-V: Vector && DSP Extension
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 09:50:58 +0800
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.2.1


On 2019/8/22 上午3:31, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 14:37:52 PDT (-0700), address@hidden wrote:
On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 2:07 AM Peter Maydell <address@hidden> wrote:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 at 09:53, Aleksandar Markovic
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > We can accept draft
> > extensions in QEMU as long as they are disabled by default.

> Hi, Alistair, Palmer,
>
> Is this an official stance of QEMU community, or perhaps Alistair's
> personal judgement, or maybe a rule within risv subcomunity?

Alistair asked on a previous thread; my view was:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2019-07/msg03364.html
and nobody else spoke up disagreeing (summary: should at least be
disabled-by-default and only enabled by setting an explicit
property whose name should start with the 'x-' prefix).

Agreed!


In general QEMU does sometimes introduce experimental extensions
(we've had them in the block layer, for example) and so the 'x-'
property to enable them is a reasonably established convention.
I think it's a reasonable compromise to allow this sort of work
to start and not have to live out-of-tree for a long time, without
confusing users or getting into a situation where some QEMU
versions behave differently or to obsolete drafts of a spec
without it being clear from the command line that experimental
extensions are being enabled.

There is also an element of "submaintainer judgement" to be applied
here -- upstream is probably not the place for a draft extension
to be implemented if it is:
 * still fast moving or subject to major changes of design direction
 * major changes to the codebase (especially if it requires
   changes to core code) that might later need to be redone
   entirely differently
 * still experimental

Yep, agreed. For RISC-V I think this would extend to only allowing
extensions that have backing from the foundation and are under active
discussion.

My general philosophy here is that we'll take anything written down in an official RISC-V ISA manual (ie, the ones actually released by the foundation).  This provides a single source of truth for what an extension name / version means, which is important to avoid confusion.  If it's a ratified extension then I see no reason not to support it on my end.  For frozen extensions we should probably just wait the 45 days until they go up for a ratification vote, but I'd be happy to start reviewing patches then (or earlier :)).

If the spec is a draft in the ISA manual then we need to worry about the support burden, which I don't have a fixed criteria for -- generally there shouldn't be issues here, but early drafts can be in a state where they're going to change extensively and are unlikely to be used by anyone.  There's also the question of "what is an official release of a draft specification?". That's a bit awkward right now: the current ratified ISA manual contains version 0.3 of the hypervisor extension, but I just talked to Andrew and the plan is to remove the draft extensions from the ratified manuals because these drafts are old and the official manuals update slowly.  For now I guess we'll need an an-hoc way of determining if a draft extension has been officially versioned or not, which is a bit of a headache.

We already have examples of supporting draft extensions, including priv-1.9.1.  This does cause some pain for us on the QEMU side (CSR bits have different semantics between the specs), but there's 1.9.1 hardware out there and the port continues to be useful so I'd be in favor of keeping it around for now.  I suppose there is an implicit risk that draft extensions will be deprecated, but the "x-" prefix, draft status, and long deprecation period should be sufficient to inform users of the risk.  I wouldn't be opposed to adding a "this is a draft ISA" warning, but I feel like it might be a bit overkill.

Hi, Palmer

Maybe it is the headache of open source hardware. Everyone cooperates to build a better architecture.

In my opinion, we should focus on the future. The code in QEMU mainline should evolve to the  ratified extension step by step, and only support the best extension at last.

At that time,  even many hardwares just support  the deprecated draft extension,  the draft codes should be in the wild and maintained by the hardware manufactures.

But before that,  it is better to  have a draft implementation. So that We can work step by step to accelerate the coming of the ratified extension.

Even at last draft extension implementation are deprecated, they are not meaningless. The manufactures may use  the  history commit to support their hardwares that

only support drafted extension.

Best Regards,

Zhiwei


Alistair


thanks
-- PMM




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]