[PATCH 0/2] armv7m_systick: Rewrite to use ptimers

[Peter Maydell]

This patch series rewrites our implementation of the armv7m systick
timer to use ptimers.

The armv7m systick timer is a 24-bit decrementing, wrap-on-zero,
clear-on-write counter.  Our current implementation has various bugs
and dubious workarounds in it (for instance see
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1872237).
    
We have an implementation of a simple decrementing counter and we put
a lot of effort into making sure it handles the interesting corner
cases (like "spend a cycle at 0 before reloading"), so rather than
trying to fix these all over again in systick's hand-rolled countdown
code it's much simpler to just rewrite it to use a ptimer.
    
Unfortunately this is a migration compatibility break, which will
affect all M-profile boards.
   
Among other bugs, this fixes
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1872237 : now writes to SYST_CVR
when the timer is enabled correctly do nothing; when the timer is
enabled via SYST_CSR.ENABLE, the ptimer code will (because of
POLICY_NO_IMMEDIATE_RELOAD) arrange that after one timer tick the
counter is reloaded from SYST_RVR and then counts down from there, as
the architecture requires.

Side note: the trace from the test program in LP1872237 won't look
quite like it does on the hardware: under QEMU the "waiting for 1000
ms" debug printing generally reports a SYST_CVR value of 0.  This is
because QEMU's emulated CPU is comparatively fast and our systick has a
hard-wired value of 1MHz for the frequency of the 'external reference
clock', which means that execution of the guest code reaches "read
SYST_CVR" before the first tick of the timer clock after enabling of
the timer (which is where the reload of SYST_CVR from SYST_RVR is
required).  The exception is the first iteration, where the time QEMU
takes to translate the guest code is enough that the timer tick
happens before the register read.  You can also get the timer tick to
win the race by fiddling around with the -icount option (which
effectively is slowing down the emulated CPU speed).

Some day we should model both the 'system_clock_scale' (ie the CPU
clock frequency) and the 'external reference clock' as QEMU clock
source/sinks so that board code can specify the correct reference
clock frequency.

Patch 1 is a minor tweak to the ptimer code to suppress a spurious
warning message for the "timer callback function disabled the ptimer"
case, which the systick timer uses.  Patch 2 is the actual
conversion.

thanks
-- PMM


Peter Maydell (2):
  hw/core/ptimer: Support ptimer being disabled by timer callback
  hw/timer/armv7m_systick: Rewrite to use ptimers

 include/hw/timer/armv7m_systick.h |   3 +-
 hw/core/ptimer.c                  |   4 +
 hw/timer/armv7m_systick.c         | 124 +++++++++++++-----------------
 3 files changed, 58 insertions(+), 73 deletions(-)

-- 
2.20.1