On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 03:42:19PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Thursday 01 December 2011, Catalin Marinas wrote:
Given the way register banking is done on AArch64, issuing an HVC on a 32-bit guest OS doesn't require translation on a 64-bit hypervisor. We have a similar implementation at the SVC level (for 32-bit user apps on a 64-bit kernel), the only modification was where a 32-bit SVC takes a 64-bit parameter in two separate 32-bit registers, so packing needs to be done in a syscall wrapper.
How do you deal with signed integer arguments passed into SVC or HVC from a caller? If I understand the architecture correctly, the upper halves of the argument register end up zero-padded, while the callee expects sign-extension.
If you treat it as an "int" (32-bit) and function prototype defined accordingly, then the generated code only accesses it as a W (rather than X) register and the top 32-bit part is ignored (no need for sign-extension). If it is defined as a "long" in the 32-bit world, then it indeed needs explicit conversion given the different sizes for long (for example sys_lseek, the second argument is a 'long' and we do explicit sign extension in the wrapper).