Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 03/26] Add a hook to allow hypercalls to be emulated on PowerPC

[Alexander Graf]

On 18.03.2011, at 05:03, David Gibson <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 08:20:52AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> On 03/16/2011 11:55 PM, David Gibson wrote:
>>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 03:44:49PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>> On 03/15/2011 11:56 PM, David Gibson wrote:
> [snip]
>>>> Is the hypercall handler ever specific to a CPU?
>>> If you mean, "is the hypercall environment ever different from one cpu
>>> to another within the same guest at the same time", then no.  Or at
>>> least, no for any platform that exists now, and anything plausible I
>>> can think of.
>> 
>> Yes, that's what I was asking.  So having a function pointer in each
>> CPUState isn't necessary.
> 
> That's right.
> 
>>> If you mean can the hypercall ABI and handling be different for
>>> different CPU models within an architecture, then yes.  It's not there
>>> yet, but BookE CPUs *will* have a quite different hypercall
>>> environment to the PAPR hypercall environment used on IBM servers.
>>> 
>>>> I'd prefer to see this as a generic interface that wasn't specific
>>>> to target-ppc.
>>>> Basically, add a:
>>>> 
>>>> void cpu_hypercall(CPUState *env);
>>>> 
>>>> And then implement it within your target.
>>> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "target" here.  It is *not*
>>> sufficient to make the hypercall function per guest architecture, it
>>> must be per machine.  However, it could be a global hook rather than
>>> in the CPUState.
>> 
>> I'd suggest a totally generic hypercall infrastructure but I know
>> that's not plausible for Power.
> 
> I'm still not sure what you're getting at here.  I can't see how a
> generic (as in across architectures) hypercall infrastructure makes
> sense when clearly both the implemenentation of a hypercall, and the
> trigger to fire it off will be ISA specific.

I second that feeling. The reason for abstracting mmio and pio calls is so that 
multiple targets can share device emulation code. Hypercall code is 100% 
platform specific anyways.

Alex

>