Re: [PATCH] target/ppc: Integrate icount to purr, vtb, and tbu40

[Peter Maydell]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2020 at 14:33, Gustavo Romero <gromero@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> On 8/11/20 6:31 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > You don't want to call gen_io_end; you just need to ensure that
> > you end the TB immediately after this insn. See
> > docs/devel/tcg-icount.rst.
>
> I understand that to ensure that TB ends immediately after these
> instructions (I understood you meant all the cases, not just the
> spr_read_purr case, right?), the instructions should be a branch
> or change CPU state in a way that cannot be deduced at translation
> time, and I don't know how to ensure that in these cases, they
> are neither, specially for the read access, which doesn't change
> any CPU state specifically afaics.

No, you have that the wrong way around. *If* an instruction
is a branch or a state-changing one, *then* it must end
the TB. That doesn't mean that *only* those kinds of insn
can end the TB -- other things also can end a TB. (It also
doesn't mean that a branch etc will automatically end the
TB -- it means that if you're writing the bit of target
code that generates code for a branch/etc then you must
specifically ensure that you end the TB.)

> If I remove the gen_io_end() from all these cases the VM gets
> stuck at apparently random points of execution (I'm digging
> into details right now trying to understand why).

Probably because you're not ending the TB after the insn.

PowerPC seems to be doing something slightly weird in this area --
it classifies "stop translation" as a kind of exception
(POWERPC_EXCP_STOP) rather than just using the common-code
is_jmp machinery and setting it to DISAS_EXIT. So you'll
need a ppc expert to say what the right thing is, but my
guess is you want to call gen_stop_exception() -- compare
gen_darn().

thanks
-- PMM