Re: PowerPC page faults

From: Anthony Liguori
Date: Mon May 11 2009 - 18:18:17 EST


Hollis Blanchard wrote:
On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 12:54 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
For future ppcemb's, do you know if there is an equivalent of a PF exit type? Does the hardware squirrel away the faulting address somewhere and set PC to the start of the instruction? If so, no guest memory load should be required.

Ahhh... you're saying that the address itself (or offset within a page)
is the hypercall token, totally separate from IO emulation, and so we
could ignore the access size.

No, I'm not being nearly that clever.

I was suggesting that hardware virtualization support in future PPC systems might contain a mechanism to intercept a guest-mode TLB miss. If it did, it would be useful if that guest-mode TLB miss "exit" contained extra information somewhere that included the PC of the faulting instruction, the address response for the fault, and enough information to handle the fault without instruction decoding.

I assume all MMIO comes from the same set of instructions in PPC? Something like ld/st instructions? Presumably all you need to know from instruction decoding is the destination register and whether it was a read or write?

Or am I oversimplifying? Does the current hardware spec contain this sort of assistance?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

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