Re: [PATCH 03/11] dt-bindings: interrupt-controller: RISC-V PLIC documentation

From: Atish Patra
Date: Wed Aug 08 2018 - 02:42:10 EST


On 8/7/18 7:17 PM, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
On Mon, 06 Aug 2018 13:59:48 PDT (-0700), robh+dt@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 4:08 PM Atish Patra <atish.patra@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On 8/2/18 4:50 AM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
From: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>

This patch adds documentation for the platform-level interrupt
controller (PLIC) found in all RISC-V systems. This interrupt
controller routes interrupts from all the devices in the system to each
hart-local interrupt controller.

Note: the DTS bindings for the PLIC aren't set in stone yet, as we might
want to change how we're specifying holes in the hart list.

Signed-off-by: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
[hch: various fixes and updates]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx>
---
.../interrupt-controller/sifive,plic0.txt | 57 +++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 57 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 Documentation/devicetree/bindings/interrupt-controller/sifive,plic0.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/interrupt-controller/sifive,plic0.txt b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/interrupt-controller/sifive,plic0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..c756cd208a93
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/interrupt-controller/sifive,plic0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+SiFive Platform-Level Interrupt Controller (PLIC)
+-------------------------------------------------
+
+SiFive SOCs include an implementation of the Platform-Level Interrupt Controller
+(PLIC) high-level specification in the RISC-V Privileged Architecture
+specification. The PLIC connects all external interrupts in the system to all
+hart contexts in the system, via the external interrupt source in each hart.
+
+A hart context is a privilege mode in a hardware execution thread. For example,
+in an 4 core system with 2-way SMT, you have 8 harts and probably at least two
+privilege modes per hart; machine mode and supervisor mode.
+
+Each interrupt can be enabled on per-context basis. Any context can claim
+a pending enabled interrupt and then release it once it has been handled.
+
+Each interrupt has a configurable priority. Higher priority interrupts are
+serviced first. Each context can specify a priority threshold. Interrupts
+with priority below this threshold will not cause the PLIC to raise its
+interrupt line leading to the context.
+
+While the PLIC supports both edge-triggered and level-triggered interrupts,
+interrupt handlers are oblivious to this distinction and therefore it is not
+specified in the PLIC device-tree binding.
+
+While the RISC-V ISA doesn't specify a memory layout for the PLIC, the
+"sifive,plic0" device is a concrete implementation of the PLIC that contains a
+specific memory layout, which is documented in chapter 8 of the SiFive U5
+Coreplex Series Manual <https://static.dev.sifive.com/U54-MC-RVCoreIP.pdf>.
+
+Required properties:
+- compatible : "sifive,plic0"

I think there was a thread bouncing around somewhere where decided to pick the
official name of the compatible string to be "sifive,plic-1.0". The idea here
is that the PLIC is compatible across all of SiFive's current implementations,
but there's some limitations in the memory map that will probably cause us to
spin a version 2 at some point so we want major version number. The minor
number is just in case we find some errata in the PLIC.

+- #address-cells : should be <0>
+- #interrupt-cells : should be <1>
+- interrupt-controller : Identifies the node as an interrupt controller
+- reg : Should contain 1 register range (address and length)

The one in the real device tree has two entries.
reg = <0x00000000 0x0c000000 0x00000000 0x04000000>;

Is it intentional or just incorrect entry left over from earlier days?

+ reg = <0xc000000 0x4000000>;

Looks to me like one has #size-cells and #address-cells set to 2 and
the example is using 1.

Yes. For some background on how this works: we have a hardware generator that
has a tree-of-busses abstraction, and each device is attached to some point on
that tree. When a device gets attached to the bus, we also generate a device
tree entry. For whatever system I generated the example PLIC device tree entry
from, it must have been attached to a bus with addresses of 32 bits or less,
which resulted in #address-cells and #size-cells being 1.


Thanks Palmer for the detailed explanation.

Christoph has a HiFive Unleashed, which has a fu540-c000 on it, which is
probably not what I generated as an example -- the fu540-c000 is a complicated
configuration, when I mess around with the hardware I tend to use simple ones
as I'm not really a hardware guy. I suppose the bus that the PLIC is hanging
off on the fu540-c000 has addresses wider than 32 bits. This makes sense, as
the machine has 8GiB of memory and the PLIC is on a bus that's closer to the
core than the DRAM is, so it'd need at least enough address bits to fit 8GiB.

Is the inconsistency a problem? I generally write device tree handling code to
just respect whatever #*-fields says and don't consider that part of the
specification of the binding. I don't mind changing the example to have
#size-fields and #address-fields to be 2, but since it's not wrong I also don't
see any reason to change it. We do have 32-bit devices with PLICs, and while
they're not Linux-capable devices we're trying to adopt the Linux device tree
bindings through the rest of the RISC-V software ecosystem as they tend to be
pretty well thought out.


Sounds good to me. IMHO, the inconsistencies and its reasoning are well documented which is good enough for now.

Regards,
Atish