Re: [PATCH] riscv: Make semihosting configurable for all privilege modes

[Furquan Shaikh]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 5:30 PM Richard Henderson
<richard.henderson@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> On 8/12/22 16:57, Furquan Shaikh wrote:
> > I am not sure if I understood your comment correctly. Currently, qemu
> > has a check in `riscv_cpu_do_interrupt` to allow semihosting calls
> > only in S and M modes. This prevents semihosting calls from U mode.
> > This patch changes the default behavior of checking `>= PRV_S` for
> > semihosting and instead replaces it with the usage of
> > ebreak{m,s,u,vs,vu} properties to allow the user to configure what
> > modes should allow semihosting calls when `-semihosting` argument is
> > selected.
>
> Why do you need such fine-grained control?  What is the use-case?

I ran into a problem when I was testing a project (with a microkernel
in M-mode and tasks in U-mode) that uses semihosting for debugging.
The semihosting worked fine for M-mode but not in U-mode. As I started
digging into this, I realized that this is because qemu restricts
semihosting to only M and S modes. From reading the debug spec, I
understood that the DCSR presents options for ebreak behavior in each
mode including VS and VU. Adding CPU settable features to enable
ebreak behavior seemed like a flexible solution to support different
cases:
1. Old behavior of restricting semihosting to M and S modes by setting
only ebreakm and ebreaks.
2. My case of enabling semihosting to work in U-mode by setting only ebreaku.
3. Any future case where users would want to enable semihosting in
either M,S,U,VS or VU modes or any combination of these.

>
> r~