Re: [PATCH v7 03/10] target/riscv: allow MISA writes as experimental

[Bin Meng]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 2:53 AM Daniel Henrique Barboza
<dbarboza@ventanamicro.com> wrote:
>
> At this moment, and apparently since ever, we have no way of enabling
> RISCV_FEATURE_MISA. This means that all the code from write_misa(), all
> the nuts and bolts that handles how to properly write this CSR, has
> always been a no-op as well because write_misa() will always exit
> earlier.
>
> This seems to be benign in the majority of cases. Booting an Ubuntu
> 'virt' guest and logging all the calls to 'write_misa' shows that no
> writes to MISA CSR was attempted. Writing MISA, i.e. enabling/disabling
> RISC-V extensions after the machine is powered on, seems to be a niche
> use.
>
> After discussions in the mailing list, most notably in [1], we reached
> the consensus that this code is not suited to be exposed to users
> because it's not well tested, but at the same time removing it is a bit
> extreme because we would like to fix it, and it's easier to do so with
> the code available to use instead of fetching it from git log.
>
> The approach taken here is to get rid of RISCV_FEATURE_MISA altogether
> and use a new experimental flag called x-misa-w. The default value is
> false, meaning that we're keeping the existing behavior of doing nothing
> if a write_misa() is attempted. As with any existing experimental flag,
> x-misa-w is also a temporary flag that we need to remove once we fix
> write_misa().
>
> [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2023-02/msg05092.html
>
> Signed-off-by: Daniel Henrique Barboza <dbarboza@ventanamicro.com>
> ---
>  target/riscv/cpu.c | 6 ++++++
>  target/riscv/cpu.h | 2 +-
>  target/riscv/csr.c | 2 +-
>  3 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>

Reviewed-by: Bin Meng <bmeng@tinylab.org>