2012/12/3 Julius Baxter <[email protected]>:
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 8:00 AM, Olof Kindgren <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 2012/12/3 Peter Gavin <[email protected]>:
>>> On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Julius Baxter <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> So, please, go to that wiki page, submit a proposal, we can discuss
>>>> it, but it's not going into this round of the architecture spec. There
>>>> will be another opportunity, certainly.
>>>
>>>
>>> I've come to agree with Matthew that they should raise exceptions, but I'm
>>> content with your earlier suggestion that they be marked as having an
>>> implementation dependent effect so we can get the spec out.  I looked
>>> through the spec, and I believe that l.m[ft]spr with privileged addresses
>>> and l.rfe are the only instructions that could be problematic for
>>> virtualization in user mode.
>>>
>>> -Pete
>>>
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>>>
>>
>> My vote goes for proper separation of user mode and supervisor mode.
>> As we want to future-proof these things, I think it's a bad idea to
>> take shortcuts regarding the privileged instructions.
>
> Hej Olof,
>
> This isn't a shortcut, it's just something to say what the behaviour
> is, it's not locked in forever. But I understand there's the potential
> for it to be annoying if it's defined in one way in the earlier spec
> and a different, incompatible way in a later version. So, I'm going to
> leave it in an unfinished state, like other things (instruction
> classes are another big issue we haven't gotten to the bottom of, and
> that is a far more important and practical issue than this hypervisor
> stuff.)
>
>>
>> On the other hand I can also see the need to push out a 1.0 spec. One
>> of the things that we really need in the spec is the updated revision
>> registers. That feature will allow us to break backwards compatibility
>> easier in the future as we can ask the hardware what version of the
>> arch spec we are implementing.
>>
>> With this said, would it be possible to put out a new version of the
>> arch spec with just the versioning stuff (plus all the things that we
>> have finished discussing) and put the rest of the things on hold for a
>> while? I fear that the number of proposed changes are growing too much
>> for a single update
>
> That's basically what we're doing. I'm adding the things which we have
> known about and discussed for months. The most recent development
> which is going in is the overflow exception behaviour, but this has
> been discussed for months and I'm convinced we've got a solution.
>
> Beyond that, as I mentioned, we've still got a lot of big issues to
> solve in the spec, like the instruction classes, instructions for
> atomic memory access, performance counters, sleep/halt instructions.
> etc. So there's definitely things we've not solved yet, but we should
> run with what we have, which you appear to agree to.
>
> Cheers
>
> Julius

Hi Julius,

Then you have my blessing, and also a big thanks for taking on this job.
I know it's a lot of work, but you're doing a great job of keeping it together.

Le draft est mort! Vive Le 1.0 spec!

-- 
Olof Kindgren
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ORSoC
Website: www.orsoc.se
Email: [email protected]
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FPGA, ASIC, DSP - embedded SoC design
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