ARM Snapshots Not Backwards-Compatible

[Aaron Lindsay]

Hello,

I'm attempting to restore an AArch64 snapshot taken on QEMU 4.1.0 on
QEMU 5.2.0, using system mode. My previous impression, possibly from
https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/Migration/Troubleshooting#Basics was that
this ought to work:

> Note that QEMU supports migrating forward between QEMU versions

Note that I'm using qemu-system-aarch64 with -loadvm.

However, I've run into several issues I thought I should report. The
first of them was that this commit changed the address of CBAR, which
resulted in a mismatch of the register IDs in `cpu_post_load` in
target/arm/machine.c:
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/qemu-devel/patch/20190927144249.29999-2-peter.maydell@linaro.org/

The second was that several system registers have changed which bits are
allowed to be written in different circumstances, seemingly as a result
of a combination of bugfixes and implementation of additional behavior.
These hit errors detected in `write_list_to_cpustate` in
target/arm/helper.c.

The third is that meanings of the bits in env->features (as defined by
`enum arm_features` in target/arm/cpu.h) has shifted. For example,
ARM_FEATURE_PXN, ARM_FEATURE_CRC, ARM_FEATURE_VFP, ARM_FEATURE_VFP3,
ARM_FEATURE_VFP4 have all been removed and ARM_FEATURE_V8_1M has been
added since 4.1.0. Heck, even I have added a field there in the past.
Unfortunately, these additions/removals mean that when env->features is
saved on one version and restored on another the bits can mean different
things. Notably, the removal of the *VFP features means that a snapshot
of a CPU reporting it supports ARM_FEATURE_VFP3 on 4.1.0 thinks it's now
ARM_FEATURE_M on 5.2.0!

My guess, given the numerous issues and the additional complexity
required to properly implement backwards-compatible snapshotting, is
that this is not a primary goal. However, if it is a goal, what steps
can/should we take to support it more thoroughly?

Thanks!

-Aaron

p.s. Now for an admission: the snapshots I'm testing with were
originally taken with `-cpu max`. This was unintentional, and I
understand if the response is that I can't expect `-cpu max` checkpoints
to work across QEMU versions... but I also don't think that all of these
issues can be blamed on that (notably CBAR and env->features).