Re: Semihosting, arm, riscv, ppc and common code

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Thu, 2020-01-16 at 00:02 +0200, Liviu Ionescu wrote:
> > ... they did have the opportunity to do better, and did not.
> 
> I don't know why you present Arm semihosting as a disaster. It is not
> perfect, but it is functional, and common unit tests use only a small
> subset of the calls.
> 
> And there is no 'window of opportunity', if the RISC-V guys will ever
> want to reinvent the wheel and come with an official 'RISC-V
> semihosting' specs, they can do it at any time, and this will have no
> impact on existing devices, everything will continue to work as
> before, only the debuggers/emulators will need to be upgraded.
> 
> But the only immediate effect such a move will have is that software
> efforts in test frameworks will be increased, to support another
> protocol, while the advantages will be minimal.

I agree, which is also why I want to use the same interface for
powerpc, it will simply make life easier for everybody. The calls
aren't perfect but they do work sufficiently well to be useful and I
haven't yet been convinced that it can't be extended if necessary.

Cheers,
Ben.