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Re: [PATCH v2] arch/sh: provide unified syscall trap compatible with all SH models

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  Re: [PATCH v2] arch/sh: provide unified syscall trap compatible with  all SH models Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> - 2015-09-15 05:20 +0200
    Re: [PATCH v2] arch/sh: provide unified syscall trap compatible with  all SH models Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> - 2015-09-15 06:30 +0200

#1224617 — Re: [PATCH v2] arch/sh: provide unified syscall trap compatible with all SH models

On 08/25/2015 04:23 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> From: Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>
> 
> Historically SH-2 Linux (and originally uClinux) used a syscall
> calling convention incompatible with the established SH-3/4 Linux ABI.
> This choice was made because the trap range used by the existing ABI,
> 0x10-0x17, overlaps with the hardware exception/interrupt trap range
> reserved by SH-2, and in particular, with the SH-2A divide-by-zero and
> division-overflow exceptions.
> 
> Despite the documented syscall convention using the low bits of the
> trap number to signal the number of arguments the kernel should
> expect, no version of the kernel has ever used this information, nor
> is it useful; all of the registers need to be saved anyway. Therefore,
> it is possible to pick a new trap number, 0x1f, that is both supported
> by all existing SH-3/4 kernels and unassigned as a hardware trap in
> the SH-2 range. This makes it possible to produce SH-2 application
> binaries that are forwards-compatible with running on SH-3/4 kernels
> and to treat SH as a unified platform with varying ISA support levels
> rather than multiple gratuitously-incompatible platforms.
> 
> This patch adjusts the range checking SH-2 and SH-2A kernels make for
> the syscall trap to accept the range 0x1f-0x2f rather than just
> 0x20-0x2f. As a result, trap 0x1f now acts as a syscall for all SH
> models.

Except that sh2 is a nommu platform, requiring different binary formats.
You can't run a standard ELF binary on sh2, and sh3/4 usually don't have
fdpic or elf loaders configured in.

Even if you could, basic system calls like fork() don't work on a nommu
system. The workarounds for fork() not working (re-exec yourself
signaling that this is the second instance, then have main() detect the
signal and call a different entry point) are intrusive and cumbersome
enough that you generally don't want them in programs that _don't_ need
them. Therefore you historically always distinguish at build time
whether to include nommu codepaths or not. This is why uClibc doesn't
include those in nommu builds of the library, so you can easily
comple-time probe for it even when cross compiling.

(Speaking of which, I would very much like to be able to pass a NULL
exec to signal "re-exec this same program" without relying on /proc to
be mounted for /proc/self/exe, but alas the kernel can't do that.)

I agree it doesn't hurt anything (other than new binaries built to use
it not running on old kernels, but that's pretty much the case for fdpic
anyway), but what is the actual _advantage_ of this patch?

Rob
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#1224635

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 10:17:50PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 08/25/2015 04:23 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> > From: Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>
> > 
> > Historically SH-2 Linux (and originally uClinux) used a syscall
> > calling convention incompatible with the established SH-3/4 Linux ABI.
> > This choice was made because the trap range used by the existing ABI,
> > 0x10-0x17, overlaps with the hardware exception/interrupt trap range
> > reserved by SH-2, and in particular, with the SH-2A divide-by-zero and
> > division-overflow exceptions.
> > 
> > Despite the documented syscall convention using the low bits of the
> > trap number to signal the number of arguments the kernel should
> > expect, no version of the kernel has ever used this information, nor
> > is it useful; all of the registers need to be saved anyway. Therefore,
> > it is possible to pick a new trap number, 0x1f, that is both supported
> > by all existing SH-3/4 kernels and unassigned as a hardware trap in
> > the SH-2 range. This makes it possible to produce SH-2 application
> > binaries that are forwards-compatible with running on SH-3/4 kernels
> > and to treat SH as a unified platform with varying ISA support levels
> > rather than multiple gratuitously-incompatible platforms.
> > 
> > This patch adjusts the range checking SH-2 and SH-2A kernels make for
> > the syscall trap to accept the range 0x1f-0x2f rather than just
> > 0x20-0x2f. As a result, trap 0x1f now acts as a syscall for all SH
> > models.
> 
> Except that sh2 is a nommu platform, requiring different binary formats.
> You can't run a standard ELF binary on sh2,

You can. It's a near-trivial patch to make it work now, though I want
to polish it more before sending it upstream.

> and sh3/4 usually don't have
> fdpic or elf loaders configured in.

The normal ELF loader loads FDPIC just fine; it just doesn't float the
data segment separately. At first it didn't work for me due to
limitations in my entry-point code, but now even qemu-sh4eb runs my
FDPIC binaries fine. Of course it would be really _nice_ to have
separately floating text/data even on systems with MMU. In theory the
code in binfmt_elf_fdpic.c supports this, but it's just not enabled in
kconfig.

> Even if you could, basic system calls like fork() don't work on a nommu
> system.

Obviously programs that need fork will not work. But the vast majority
of software does not need fork -- or if it does need it, is using it
gratuitously, and should be using posix_spawn which would give you
both major performance boosts and NOMMU support.

And of course the other direction, which is the interesting one, of
course works perfectly fine -- software that does not expect fork to
be available because it was built for NOMMU certainly does not care if
fork is available on the system it actually runs on.

> I agree it doesn't hurt anything (other than new binaries built to use
> it not running on old kernels, but that's pretty much the case for fdpic
> anyway), but what is the actual _advantage_ of this patch?

I've been over this many times, but I can summarize again. The big
points are:

- Ability to run & debug the exact same binaries you're going to
  deploy to NOMMU hardware on a much nicer system with memory
  protection, dev tools, etc. (or qemu-sh4eb).

- Establishing SH as a mature, serious platform with ISA levels and
  only minimal hard ABI splits (like endianness, hard/soft float,
  etc.) rather than having each ISA level be its own completely
  separate and incompatible platform.

Do these seem unreasonable?

Rich
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