On 02/12/11 12:08, Steve Reinhardt wrote:
>
>     1. I like the idea of moving this out of x86, although practically 
> speaking I don't know that any other ISA would be able to use it right now. 
> I'll still move it though. This is, of course, talking about the faults 
> themselves and not the instruction objects. The instructions are x86 specific.
>
> Right, I'm just talking about the fault objects, and even though no
> other ISA uses them right now this at least opens up that possibility
> for the future.
>
>     2. Ok. I don't really see how it's better, but I don't think it's worse.
>
> Thanks.
>
>     3. Yes. X86 uses all those for it's debugging microops. They were brought 
> into existence so that those microops could be speculatively executed safely.
>
> If it's purely for debugging, then would DPRINTF be more appropriate
> than warn?  I still don't quite understand your usage model here.

This is for error checking in microcode. Lets say you have microcode
like this:

// Check for flag foo to enable feature bar
and t1, t2, t3
// If foo isn't set, skip over the microcode for bar
br afterBar
panic "Feature bar not implemented"
afterBar:
blah blah

Or you could make that a warn if feature bar wasn't that important. I
suppose DPRINTF might sort of work, but it's not obvious how you could
generically pick a trace flag to control it with. You'd have to pick
something and hard code it, I think.

>
> Also, how do we distinguish panic from fatal in this case?  I guess
> it's hard to decide a priori when you get something like a
> machine-check error whether that's due to a user error or an M5 bug,
> but I'd think we would pick one or the other (probably assume it's a
> user problem, like a bad kernel or device, and call it fatal) in which
> case we wouldn't need panic.

This isn't for reporting the sort of problem I think you're assuming it
is, though maybe I misinterpreting what you're saying. It seems to me
that fatal or panic could each be appropriate some times, although I'd
like to hear more about why you don't.

Gabe
_______________________________________________
m5-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/m5-dev

Reply via email to