== Last week ==
* Launchpad #721021 GCC ICE on ARM/XScale: identified as case of
upstream PR45177; backported and pushed to Linaro.
* Launchpad #709453/CS Issue #7122: Neon vmov 0.0 issues; some progress
on my current WIP patch, but tests showed another 3 regressions, still
on-going.
* Launchpad #711819/GCC PR47719: ICE in push_minipool_fix. Ramana
reminded that my patch, which added some pool range attributes, were
actually removed earlier by Bernd in the fix for PR43137. Discussed and
mostly concluded that we should add them back for now. Will re-submit
patch with testcase to gcc-patches this week.
* Coremark ARMv7-A regressions: still work in progress.
== This week ==
* TW Public Holiday Feb.28 (Mon).
* Ping some of my upstream patch submissions.
* Get incompleted issues done.
* Coremark regression investigation.
Hello Linaro toolchain guys,
I have a few questions regarding GCC fully supporting the ARM Cortex M4,
I'm especially thinking of the additional DSP instructions and if these are supported and how optimal the code being produced is?
Thanks for your support,
Best Regards
Christian (ST-Ericsson)
Hi,
== Investigate developer tools ==
* Finished latrace investigation.
== PandaBoard ==
* The defective PandaBoard that was sent back in December is now repaired and
on my desk again. It doesn't show the behaviour of #708883 and works
flawlessly so far. :)
== libunwind ==
* Did some debugging of the test-async-sig testcase to get started with
libunwind. It will dead-lock if you add "--enable-debug" since libunwind does
printfs in this case which are not signal safe.
* Sorted out which of Zachs patches are upstream and which are not.
* Started to learn about the different unwind methods that libunwind provides
on ARM.
Regards
Ken
== ffi ==
* Sent variadic patch for libffi to libffi-discuss
* Worked through some suggestions from Chung-Lin, need to do some rework
== string routines ==
* memchr & strchr patch sent for inclusion in ubuntu packages
* tried sqlite's benchmarks - they don't spend too much time in the
C library; although
a few % in memcpy, and ~1% in memset (also seem to have found an
sqlite test case failure on
ARM and filed as bug 725052)
== porting jam ==
* There wasn't much traffic on #linaro during this related to the jam
* I closed bug 635850 (fastdep FTBFS) which was already fixed with
an explicit fix for ARM in the changelog
and bug 492336 (eglibc's tst-eintr1 failing) which seems to work now
but it's not clear when it was fixed.
* Looking at eglibc's test log there seem to be a bunch of others
that are failing and may well be worth investigating.
* bug 372121 (qemu/xargs stack/number of arguments limit) seems to
work ok, however the reporter did say it was quite a fragile test;
that needs more investigation to see
whether the original reason has actually been fixed.
== misc ==
* swapping notes with Peter on the PBX SD card investigation
Dave
RAG:
Red:
Amber:
Green:
Current Milestones:
| Planned | Estimate | Actual |
qemu-linaro 2011-03 | 2011-03-08 | 2011-03-08 | |
Historical Milestones:
finish virtio-system | 2010-08-27 | postponed | |
finish testing PCI patches | 2010-10-01 | 2010-10-22 | 2010-10-18 |
successful ARM qemu pull req | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 |
finish qemu-cont-integration | 2011-01-25 | 2011-01-25 | handed off |
first qemu-linaro release | 2011-02-08 | 2011-02-08 | 2011-02-08 |
== maintain-beagle-models ==
* rebased qemu-linaro on upstream
* checked omap_uart model for any issues with enabling the extended
(non-16550A) features which the new Linux drivers need. Sent meego
merge request for patchset which turns on the features, and does
a little cleanup. Now in meego, qemu-linaro.
== merge-correctness-fixes ==
* reviewed versions 5 and 6 of Christophe's vrecpe/vsqrte patchset;
v6 was good and has now been committed
* sent a version of "dummy cp14 debug registers" patch upstream;
however I've realised it triggers a false positive in the
temp-leak debugging code in target-arm/translate.c
* wrote/sent a patch which moves this temp-leak debugging code
into TCG proper (which I think makes it much simpler and cleaner
and avoids the false positives mentioned above)
* some work on the cp15 performance counter registers. I now
have some code which I think is a fully architecturally valid
implementation of an "implements no events" core, except that
we don't implement the cycle count register.
* started testing/review of Adam's VA-to-PA translation regs patch.
In the course of this discovered that qemu unconditionally
implements an ARM940 cp15 WFI register which clashes with these;
submitted patch to add correct not-for-v6/v7 feature gating.
* sent out patch fixing usermode seeks by 32 bit guest on 64 bit
host (based on a diagnosis and suggested fix by Eoghan Sherry)
* sent patch fixing compile error in vnc code
== vexpress model ==
* sent a patchset for fixing the MMC card detect wiring on
PBX upstream; this is needed for vexpress too
* finished vexpress cleanup and cross-checking against the docs; I
now have a patchset I'm happy to upstream and will post next week
== other ==
* took part in pgp keysigning event with emdebian folks
* meetings: toolchain, PDSW-tools
Current qemu patch status is tracked here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuPatchStatus
Absences:
17/18 March: QEMU Users Forum, Grenoble
Holiday: 22 Apr - 2 May
9-13 May: UDS, Budapest
(maybe) ~17-19 August: QEMU/KVM strand at LinuxCon NA, Vancouver
== GDB ==
* Worked with Will Deacon and the Linaro kernel team to
make sure HW watchpoint and Versatile Express errata
fixes are included in the upcoming Linaro kernel release.
* Committed GDB HW watchpoint patches to mainline, and
backport to Linaro GDB. This completes work on the
HW watchpoint blueprint.
* Worked on fixing the GDB part of #620611 (Unable to
backtrace out of vector page 0xffff0000). Posted
(two versions of) mainline patch for discussion.
* Worked on kernel patch for #615974 (Interrupted system
call handling).
Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
Ulrich Weigand
--
Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
STSM, GNU compiler and toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell/B.E.
IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter | Geschäftsführung: Dirk
Wittkopp
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen | Registergericht: Amtsgericht
Stuttgart, HRB 243294
== This week ==
* Looked at the poor code generated for Neon load/store intrinsics.
Looked into the history behind the treatment of VFP registers by
CANNOT_CHANGE_MODE_CLASS. Peter confirmed that the restrictions
apply only to VFPv1. Wrote a patch to improve the code, which
partly overlapped with Julian's.
* Looked at how the operations should be represented at the tree level.
Experimented with various combinations of tree codes and types
to see which felt right. Wrote this up in the message I sent today.
== Next week ==
* More vectorisation.
* Submit some queued patches.
* Maybe some bug fixing. (I see there's a reload bug just waiting
to be claimed by a lucky developer.)
On holiday the following week.
Richard
Services at ex.seabright.co.nz are back up.
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:06 PM, Michael Hope <michael.hope(a)linaro.org> wrote:
> Hi there. We've had an earthquake. Family and friends are fine but i'll be
> unavailable for a few days. Services on ex.seabright.co.nz are down. I'll
> cancel Wednesdays standup call.
>
> See you soon,
>
> -- Michael
Hello,
Implemented a patch for SMS to support targets that their doloop part is
not decoupled from the rest of the loop's instructions (which is the
current assumption of SMS). ARM is an example of such target, where the
loop's instructions might use CC reg which is used in the doloop part.
Now testing the patch on ARM and other targets that have do-loop.
Thanks,
Revital
Hi,
* vectorizer cost model
- implemented builtin_vectorization_cost for NEON
- added register spilling considerations to the cost model
- started testing/tuning on EEMBC Telecom and DenBench (for now I
have only two examples for spilling: fdct_int32 mp4encode that
shouldn't get vectorized and viterbi that should)
* measured vectorization impact on Telecom autcor - it's about 5x
(initially I got run time segfault, but the bug is already fixed on
GCC trunk, I'll have to check gcc-linaro-4.5 as well)
* NEON-vs.non-NEON degradation
- started to look at aes. There are 6 loops that get vectorized with
4.6 (due to this patch
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-05/msg01927.html that allows
cond_expr in number of loop iterations expressions) and vzip/vuzp
patch, but not with gcc-linaro-4.5. But it doesn't explain the
degradation of course.
- I don't understand mp4decodepsnr improvement, since I don't see
any loops or basic blocks vectorized.
Ira
One of the vectorisation discussions from last year was about the poor
code GCC generates for vld{2,3,4}_*() and vst{2,3,4}_*(). It forces the
result of the loads onto the stack, then loads the individual pieces from
there. It does the same thing in reverse for stores.
I think there are two major problems here:
1. The result of the vld*() is a record type such as:
typedef struct int16x4x3_t
{
int16x4_t val[3];
} int16x4x3_t;
Ideally, we'd like one of these structures to be stored in a pseudo
register. However, the ARM port currently limits in-register
record types to 64 bits, so something this big is always given
BLKmode and stored on the stack.
A simple "fix" for this is to increase MAX_FIXED_MODE_SIZE.
That would do the right thing for the structures in arm_neon.h,
but wouldn't be safe in general.
2. The vld*() returns values as a single integer (such as EI mode),
while uses of the value will typically be in a vector mode such
as V4SI. CANNOT_CHANGE_MODE_CLASS doesn't allow direct
"mode-punning" between the two in VFP_REGS, so this again
forces the punning to be done on the stack.
The code in question is:
/* FPA registers can't do subreg as all values are reformatted to internal
precision. VFP registers may only be accessed in the mode they
were set. */
#define CANNOT_CHANGE_MODE_CLASS(FROM, TO, CLASS) \
(GET_MODE_SIZE (FROM) != GET_MODE_SIZE (TO) \
? reg_classes_intersect_p (FPA_REGS, (CLASS)) \
|| reg_classes_intersect_p (VFP_REGS, (CLASS)) \
However, the VFP restriction appears to be specific to VFPv1 --
thanks to Peter for the archaeology -- and isn't a problem for v6+.
In that case, removing this restriction is an important optimisation.
I tried the patch below on the following simple testcase:
#include "arm_neon.h"
void
foo (uint16_t *a)
{
uint16x4x3_t x, y;
x = vld3_u16 (a);
y = vld3_u16 (a + 12);
x.val[0] = vadd_u16 (x.val[0], y.val[0]);
x.val[1] = vadd_u16 (x.val[1], y.val[1]);
x.val[2] = vadd_u16 (x.val[2], y.val[2]);
vst3_u16 (a, x);
}
(not necessarily sensible!). Before the patch, -O2 produced:
sub sp, sp, #48
add r3, r0, #24
vld3.16 {d16-d18}, [r3]
vld3.16 {d20-d22}, [r0]
add r3, sp, #24
vstmia sp, {d20-d22}
vstmia r3, {d16-d18}
fldd d19, [sp, #8]
fldd d16, [sp, #0]
fldd d17, [sp, #24]
fldd d20, [sp, #32]
vadd.i16 d18, d16, d17
vadd.i16 d17, d19, d20
fldd d19, [sp, #16]
fldd d20, [sp, #40]
vadd.i16 d16, d19, d20
fstd d18, [sp, #0]
fstd d17, [sp, #8]
fstd d16, [sp, #16]
vldmia sp, {d16-d18}
vst3.16 {d16-d18}, [r0]
add sp, sp, #48
bx lr
After the patch we get:
vld3.16 {d24-d26}, [r0]
add r3, r0, #24
vld3.16 {d20-d22}, [r3]
vmov q8, q12 @ ti
vadd.i16 d17, d17, d21
vadd.i16 d16, d24, d20
vadd.i16 d18, d26, d22
vst3.16 {d16-d18}, [r0]
bx lr
The VMOV is a bit disappointing, and needs further investigation.
The first hunk fixes (2), and I think is correct. The second hunk
hacks (1), and isn't suitable in itself. I'll next try to make
arm_neon.h use built-in record types that are explicitly EImode,
which should remove the need to change MAX_FIXED_MODE_SIZE.
Richard
Index: gcc/gcc/config/arm/arm.h
===================================================================
--- gcc.orig/gcc/config/arm/arm.h
+++ gcc/gcc/config/arm/arm.h
@@ -1171,10 +1171,12 @@ enum reg_class
/* FPA registers can't do subreg as all values are reformatted to internal
precision. VFP registers may only be accessed in the mode they
were set. */
-#define CANNOT_CHANGE_MODE_CLASS(FROM, TO, CLASS) \
- (GET_MODE_SIZE (FROM) != GET_MODE_SIZE (TO) \
- ? reg_classes_intersect_p (FPA_REGS, (CLASS)) \
- || reg_classes_intersect_p (VFP_REGS, (CLASS)) \
2+#define CANNOT_CHANGE_MODE_CLASS(FROM, TO, CLASS) \
+ (GET_MODE_SIZE (FROM) != GET_MODE_SIZE (TO) \
+ ? (reg_classes_intersect_p (FPA_REGS, (CLASS)) \
+ || (TARGET_VFP \
+ && reg_classes_intersect_p (VFP_REGS, (CLASS)) \
+ && arm_fpu_desc->rev == 1)) \
: 0)
/* The class value for index registers, and the one for base regs. */
@@ -2458,4 +2460,6 @@ enum arm_builtins
instruction. */
#define MAX_LDM_STM_OPS 4
+#define MAX_FIXED_MODE_SIZE GET_MODE_BITSIZE (XImode)
+
#endif /* ! GCC_ARM_H */
Hi there. We've had an earthquake. Family and friends are fine but i'll be
unavailable for a few days. Services on ex.seabright.co.nz are down. I'll
cancel Wednesdays standup call.
See you soon,
-- Michael
== GDB ==
* Working with Will Deacon, identified root cause of GDB
problems running on Versatile Express in SMP mode, and
verified that Errata workaround fixes the problem
* Finished testing GDB HW watchpoints patch on vexpress,
submitted complete patch set for mainline inclusion
* Reviewed Yao's mainline patch to enable displaced
stepping in Thumb mode
Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
Ulrich Weigand
--
Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
STSM, GNU compiler and toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell/B.E.
IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter | Geschäftsführung: Dirk
Wittkopp
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen | Registergericht: Amtsgericht
Stuttgart, HRB 243294
== Last week ==
* PR46178, PR46002: both upstream issues related to the priority
coloring mode of IRA. Both patches submitted, the first already approved
and committed. Vladimir M. did mention that the priority algorithm
would be removed once his newer "cover class-less" patches goes in
during stage1. Anyways, I got more familiar with IRA during the process,
and the patches will still be applicable to 4.5/4.6.
* PR43872: incorrectly aligned VLAs under ARM. This turned out to be a
one-liner fix. Submitted upstream awaiting approval.
* Discussed on email/IRC with Revital Eres on SMS and ARM doloop pattern
issues.
* Launchpad #721021: Linaro GCC ICE under -mtune=xscale. Investigated a
bit; did not see ICE immediately, but GCC went into infinite loop (Khem
Raj, the reporter, says it runs for a while then ICEs).
* Coremark ARMv5TE vs ARMv7-A performance regression: reproduced
consistently using our own Tegra boards. Investigated and seem to have
found something, will post more detailed findings later.
== This week ==
* Coremark investigation.
* More GCC issues.
== GCC ==
Posted 2 of our 4.5 patches upstream.
My latest 4.6 build and test completed, so I've pushed an update to the
bzr branch. The branch is now up to mainline state as of the 12th.
Merged 3 4.5 patches into Linaro GCC 4.6. Upstream review isn't
happening, so I've decided to commit them anyway. The last upload (FSF
mainline as of 12th Feb) will therefore become the baseline I'm going to
use for Linaro GCC 4.6.
Begun benchmarking the questionable patches before forward porting them,
using EEMBC. Michael Hope has given me access to one of his A9 Panda
boards in New Zealand. This ought to have been straight-forward, but of
course it wasn't. It took me a while to convince myself I was getting
meaningful results and testing the right thing. Also the A9 seemed to be
able to complete the configured iterations in 'zero' time, which fooled
me for a while. I think I now have a set up that works. It seems to run
very slowly sometimes though - something to do with SSH?
----
Upstream patched requiring review:
* Thumb2 constants:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-12/msg00652.html
* Kazu's VFP testcases:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00128.html
* Jie's thumb2 testcase fix:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00670.html
* ARM EABI half-precision functions
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00874.html
* ARM Thumb2 Spill Likely tweak
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-02/msg00880.html
RAG:
Red:
Amber:
Green: DATE/QEMU conference place confirmed, travel booked
Current Milestones:
| Planned | Estimate | Actual |
qemu-linaro 2011-03 | 2011-03-08 | 2011-03-08 | |
Historical Milestones:
finish virtio-system | 2010-08-27 | postponed | |
finish testing PCI patches | 2010-10-01 | 2010-10-22 | 2010-10-18 |
successful ARM qemu pull req | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 | 2010-12-16 |
finish qemu-cont-integration | 2011-01-25 | 2011-01-25 | handed off |
first qemu-linaro release | 2011-02-08 | 2011-02-08 | 2011-02-08 |
* maintain-beagle-models:
+ implemented missing epoll syscalls for qemu usermode,
submitted upstream
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+bug/644961
+ tracked down the problem causing serial console to break:
the new Linux driver uses some extra features of the UART
which we weren't modelling
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+bug/714600
* merge-correctness-fixes:
+ reworked VZIP/VUZP patch as per review comments, resubmitted
+ reviewed CL's latest shift patches, added fixes of my own for
large shift counts and overlapping src/dest regs, submitted
a 10 patch rolled up series
+ reviewed a patch for adding cp15 VA-PA translation ops
+ reviewed various versions of vrecpe/vsqrte patches from CL
* versatile-express model:
B Labs kindly made available their Versatile Express board model:
https://github.com/bbalban/qemu/commits/universal-branch
and I've spent a few days getting it to boot a Linaro kernel,
fixing a few bugs and cleaning up the patchset in preparation
for upstreaming it.
This included discovering a bug in qemu's SD card model which
was causing Linux not to be able to detect cards on PL181,
and resulting in spurious qemu warnings on omap3:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+bug/714606
* other:
+ ARM architecture Q&A for modelling engineers
+ booked travel/hotel for QEMU conference
* meetings: toolchain, PDSW-tools, PD comms, Linaro-in-ARM network
infrastructure, pdsw-doughnuts and 1st birthday celebration,
Current qemu patch status is tracked here:
https://wiki.linaro.org/PeterMaydell/QemuPatchStatus
Absences:
17/18 March: QEMU Users Forum, Grenoble
Holiday: 22 Apr - 2 May
9-13 May: UDS, Budapest
(maybe) ~17-19 August: QEMU/KVM strand at LinuxCon NA, Vancouver
Hi,
* continued to look into latrace and found an issue in case a dynamic
library gets unloaded. Otherwise latrace looks quite good on ARM.
https://wiki.linaro.org/KenWerner/Sandbox/latrace
* chasing bugs:
- After a lot of testing Andy Green has made a big step forward in
finding the root cause for the shut-down issue of my PandaBoard.
The PMIC is seeing an overcurrent and issues an interrupt that gets
ignored by current kernels. Then the PMIC shuts the board down for
safety reasons. As a workaround Andy has made a kernel patch for the
twl6030 driver that enables all interrupt sources. The kernel will
acknowledge the overcurrent reported by the PMIC and the board survives.
A patched kernel binary can be found at:
https://wiki.linaro.org/KenWerner/Sandbox/708883
- While testing Andys patches on the linaro natty kernels I ran into
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/720055
- The flash-kernel utility doesn't work on the PandaBoard because the
subarch check expects omap4 instead of omap:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/721147
- Looked into the apr fail (process shared mutex's fail on armel v7).
Their mutex functionality can be mappped to various methods, but only
pthread is of interest here. The code relies on pthread_mutex_lock and
pthread_mutex_trylock which is implemented by the (e)glibc. The c library
uses GCCs __sync primitives if eglibc >= 2.12.1-0ubuntu11 and GCC >=4.5.
The testprocmutex testcase passes now.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/604753
Regards
Ken
"Will Deacon" <will.deacon(a)arm.com> wrote on 02/16/2011 01:07:09 PM:
> > I've now built a kernel with CONFIG_ARM_ERRATA_720789 enabled, and the
> > symptoms indeed seem to have disappeared completely ...
>
> Yup - that's because without it, invalidating a TLB entry for a
particular
> process isn't broadcast correctly, so you can end up using the old
(pre-COW)
> mappings if you're running on a different core.
OK. So I guess the only remaining questions is: if this hardware needs the
errata fix to work properly, shouldn't it be automatically selected by the
kernel configure logic? Note that this appears to happen for certain OMAP
boards, see arch/arm/mach-omap2/Kconfig:
config ARCH_OMAP4
bool "TI OMAP4"
default y
depends on ARCH_OMAP2PLUS
select CPU_V7
select ARM_GIC
select PL310_ERRATA_588369
select ARM_ERRATA_720789 <<=====
select USB_ARCH_HAS_EHCI
But this does not happen for the vexpress; arch/arm/mach-vexpress/Kconfig
has only:
config ARCH_VEXPRESS_CA9X4
bool "Versatile Express Cortex-A9x4 tile"
select CPU_V7
select ARM_GIC
Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
Ulrich Weigand
--
Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
STSM, GNU compiler and toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell/B.E.
IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter | Geschäftsführung: Dirk
Wittkopp
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen | Registergericht: Amtsgericht
Stuttgart, HRB 243294
Hello,
* Continue looking into DENbench benchmarks.
* While testing SMS I realized that my current implementation of doloop
pattern for ARM does not follow SMS's requirement to have the doloop
instructions be decoupled from the other loop's instructions. This happens
because doloop uses CC register which might be used elsewhere in the loop.
I am looking into a solution for that.
Thanks,
Revital
Hi,
This week I looked into DENBench:
* sad8_c (hot function from mp4encode) needs SLP reduction, but it
also contains cond_expr which cannot be vectorized as reduction, so I
don't think there is anything I can do here
* fdct_int32 (another hot function from mp4encode) now gets vectorized
with vzip/vuzp patch, but the vectorization causes performance
degradation here because of multiple register spills. I also noticed
that vectorizer costs are not set for NEON, i.e., it uses default
costs. So, I am now working on costs for NEON and adding registers
consideration into vectorizer's cost model.
I also did some general vectorization research, checking opportunities
of collaboration with GRAPHITE pass and auto-parallelization.
Ira
I mentioned in the toolchain standup call that I'd done a quick
estimate of the work required to support vexpress, so I thought I
might as well clean it up a little and post it.
This is a quick summary and time estimate for adding Versatile
Express support to qemu. The general idea is that most of the
components on this board already have QEMU implementations
(since they're standard ARM primecells used in versatile/realview),
and we can live without the few major components that aren't
implemented (maybe we'd need dummy implementations if the
kernel prods them on startup.)
Components already supported by QEMU:
-------------------------------------
A9MPx4
PL050 keyboard, mouse
SMCS LAN9118 ethernet
PL011 UARTs
SP804 timers
Components with a near match in QEMU:
-------------------------------------
PL111 CLCD -- qemu has a PL110
PL180 MMC card -- qemu has a PL181
-- both cases should either just work or be fairly trivial tweaks
Components not supported by QEMU:
---------------------------------
PL041 audio
compact flash
two-wire serial bus (for PCI-express switch config and DVI-I displays)
ISP1761 Philips USB controller
User switches and LEDs -- vexpress specific, but trivial to do
Components where a dummy implementation should be sufficient:
-------------------------------------------------------------
PL310 L2 cache controller
PL341 dynamic memory controller
PL354 static memory bus controller
trustzone controllers
Other required work:
--------------------
The usual knitting for interrupts, clocks, reset etc etc.
Summary
-------
Assuming we're happy not to worry about support for
audio, USB, two-wire serial bus or compact flash, this
is about two weeks work to put together, test and get
a more-or-less upstreamable patchset from. This would
produce a platform hopefully at least as usable as
versatile, but with an A9 and 1GB RAM.
-- PMM
"Will Deacon" <will.deacon(a)arm.com> wrote on 02/14/2011 11:30:45 AM:
> > - In testing on Versatile Express, I noticed what appears to be SMP
> > related bugs in handling regular software breakpoints: occasionally,
> > software breakpoints simply are not hit and execution continues as if
> > the underlying code had not been changed at all. This symptom
> > completely goes away if GDB and the debugged process are forced to
> > the same CPU using the affinity feature (e.g. with schedtool).
>
> I've seen this issue in the past but I thought I'd fixed it. What kernel
are
> you using and do you have CONFIG_ARM_ERRATA_720789 enabled?
I'm using the 2.6.37-1002-linaro-vexpress kernel from the Linaro package
of the same name. This does *not* have CONFIG_ARM_ERRATA_720789 enabled
(presumably because the mach-vexpress/Kconfig file does not add it?) ...
> > My guess, just from seeing those symptoms, would be that when
inserting
> > a software breakpoint via ptrace, not all i-caches on all CPUs are
> > reliably flushed ... Any thoughts on this?
>
> There was an I-cache aliasing problem in the kernel coupled with a TLB
> invalidation hardware bug on the versatile express. I fixed these though
> and haven't seen any problems since.
Hmm, a TLB flush problem could also explain the symptom (because the write
of the breakpoint to the text section causes a copy-on-write operation
which
installs a new page ...)
I'll try rebuilding the kernel with the above config option enabled.
> Hmmm, I'll need to have a think about this. What does GDB do if it
receives
> a SIGTRAP with si_addr set to (potentially) complete nonsense? As an
aside,
> Cortex-A15 reports the faulting address for a watchpoint correctly, so we
> will be able to use multiple watchpoints there.
The GDB common core can handle either of the following two indications:
A) The (read/write/access) watchpoint at address XXX triggered.
B) A write watchpoint may have triggered at some address.
In the case of B, GDB will scan all the write breakpoints it is currently
tracking and compare the current value at that address with the last value
it remembers being present there. Any changes GDB sees will cause it to
report the corresponding watchpoint as triggered.
As far as the kernel interface is concerned, the important issue that the
ARM native target in GDB is able to understand what the kernel reports, so
it can in turn report either case A or B to the common core.
This means as long as there is some way for GDB to understand the kernel
is reporting a write watchpoint hit at an unknown address, everything is
fine. This could be done e.g. be reporting a "slot" zero in si_errno to
indicate the slot (and then also the address) triggering the watchpoint
is unknown ...
> > - Finally, I noticed when reading kernel code that under some
> > circumstances, the kernel will automatically do a single step to
> > get off a watchpoint that was just hit. However, this does not
> > happen for user-space watchpoints installed via ptrace, right?
> > (Just wanting to confirm; since GDB currently does that single
> > step itself -- we don't want *both* kernel and GDB to issue a
> > single step each ...)
>
> If the {break,watch}point has been inserted via ptrace, the kernel will
> send a SIGTRAP instead of stepping the instruction.
OK, thanks for the confirmation!
> > I haven't gotten to looking further into other hardware (IGEP,
> > Panda) -- that's next on the list.
>
> Good stuff, keep me posted if you see any further problems!
Sure, will do!
Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards
Ulrich Weigand
--
Dr. Ulrich Weigand | Phone: +49-7031/16-3727
STSM, GNU compiler and toolchain for Linux on System z and Cell/B.E.
IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
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Stuttgart, HRB 243294
Hello, my fellow ARM aficionados!
The Linaro Developer Platform Team is pleased to announce a new initiative
to help improve the state of software on ARM: the ARM porting jam. Starting
today, February 16th, we will be running a weekly IRC jam on Wednesdays from
1400-1800 UTC to bring developers together to work on all manner of
userspace porting bugs, with the aim of fixing portability issues and
getting the fixes delivered to our upstreams.
An initial porting queue of known issues can be found here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.tag=arm-porting-queue
Interested in making the software in Ubuntu run better on ARM? Stop on by
the #linaro channel on irc.linaro.org today!
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek(a)ubuntu.com vorlon(a)debian.org
