[PATCH 9/9] arm64: Documentation - Expose CPU feature registers

[Suzuki K Poulose <suzuki.poulose@arm.com>]

Documentation for the infrastructure to expose CPU feature
register by emulating MRS.

Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Cc: Dave Martin <dave.martin@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Suzuki K Poulose <suzuki.poulose@arm.com>
---
 Documentation/arm64/cpu-feature-registers.txt | 198 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 arch/arm64/kernel/cpufeature.c                |   4 +
 2 files changed, 202 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/arm64/cpu-feature-registers.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/arm64/cpu-feature-registers.txt b/Documentation/arm64/cpu-feature-registers.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e10bbc2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/arm64/cpu-feature-registers.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,198 @@
+		ARM64 CPU Feature Registers
+		===========================
+
+Author: Suzuki K Poulose <suzuki.poulose@arm.com>
+
+
+This file describes the API for exporting the AArch64 CPU ID/feature
+registers to userspace. The availability of this API is advertised
+via the HWCAP_CPUID in HWCAPs.
+
+1. Motivation
+---------------
+
+The ARM architecture defines a set of feature registers, which describe
+the capabilities of the CPU/system. Access to these system registers is
+restricted from EL0 and there is no reliable way for an application to
+extract this information to make better decisions at runtime. There is
+limited information available to the application via HWCAPs, however
+there are some issues with their usage.
+
+ a) Any change to the HWCAPs requires an update to userspace (e.g libc)
+    to detect the new changes, which can take a long time to appear in
+    distributions. Exposing the registers allows applications to get the
+    information without requiring updates to the toolchains.
+
+ b) Access to HWCAPs is sometimes limited (e.g prior to libc, or
+    when ld is initialised at startup time).
+
+ c) HWCAPs cannot represent non-boolean information effectively. The
+    architecture defines a canonical format for representing features
+    in the ID registers; this is well defined and is capable of
+    representing all valid architecture variations. Exposing the ID
+    registers avoids having to come up with HWCAP representations and
+    parsing code.
+
+
+2. Requirements
+-----------------
+
+ a) Safety :
+    Applications should be able to use the information provided by the
+    infrastructure to run safely across the system. This has greater
+    implications on a system with heterogeneous CPUs.
+    The infrastructure exports a value that is safe across all the
+    available CPU on the system.
+
+    e.g, If at least one CPU doesn't implement CRC32 instructions, while
+    others do, we should report that the CRC32 is not implemented.
+    Otherwise an application could crash when scheduled on the CPU
+    which doesn't support CRC32.
+
+ b) Security :
+    Applications should only be able to receive information that is
+    relevant to the normal operation in userspace. Hence, some of the
+    fields are masked out and the values of the fields are set to
+    indicate the feature is 'not supported' (See the 'visible' field in
+    the table in Section 4). Also, the kernel may manipulate the fields
+    based on what it supports. e.g, If FP is not supported by the
+    kernel, the values could indicate that the FP is not available
+    (even when the CPU provides it).
+
+ c) Implementation Defined Features
+    The infrastructure doesn't expose any register which is
+    IMPLEMENTATION DEFINED as per ARMv8-A Architecture.
+
+ d) CPU Identification :
+    MIDR_EL1 is exposed to help identify the processor. On a
+    heterogeneous system, this could be racy (just like getcpu()). The
+    process could be migrated to another CPU by the time it uses the
+    register value, unless the CPU affinity is set. Hence, there is no
+    guarantee that the value reflects the processor that it is
+    currently executing on. The REVIDR is not exposed due to this
+    constraint, as REVIDR makes sense only in conjunction with the
+    MIDR. Alternately, MIDR_EL1 and REVIDR_EL1 are exposed via sysfs
+    at:
+
+	/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu$ID/regs/identification/
+	                                              \- midr
+	                                              \- revidr
+
+The list of supported registers and the attributes of individual
+feature bits are listed in section 4. Unless there is absolute
+necessity, we don't encourage the addition of new feature registers to
+the list. In any case, it should comply to the requirements listed
+above.
+
+3. Implementation
+--------------------
+
+The infrastructure is built on the emulation of the 'MRS' instruction.
+Accessing a restricted system register from an application generates an
+exception and ends up in SIGILL being delivered to the process.
+The infrastructure hooks into the exception handler and emulates the
+operation if the source belongs to the supported system register space.
+
+The infrastructure emulates only the following system register space:
+	Op0=3, Op1=0, CRn=0
+
+(See Table C5-6 'System instruction encodings for non-Debug System
+register accesses' in ARMv8 ARM DDI 0487A.h, for the list of
+registers).
+
+
+The following rules are applied to the value returned by the
+infrastructure:
+
+ a) The value of an 'IMPLEMENTATION DEFINED' field is set to 0.
+ b) The value of a reserved field is populated with the reserved
+    value as defined by the architecture.
+ c) The value of a field marked as not 'visible', is set to indicate
+    the feature is missing (as defined by the architecture).
+ d) The value of a 'visible' field holds the system wide safe value
+    for the particular feature(except for MIDR_EL1, see section 4).
+    See Appendix I for more information on safe value.
+
+There are only a few registers visible to the userspace. See Section 4,
+for the list of 'visible' registers.
+
+All others are emulated as having 'invisible' features.
+
+4. List of exposed registers
+-----------------------------
+
+  1) ID_AA64ISAR0_EL1 - Instruction Set Attribute Register 0
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+     | Name                         |  bits   | visible |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | RES0                         | [63-24] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | ATOMICS                      | [20-23] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | CRC32                        | [19-16] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | SHA2                         | [15-12] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | SHA1                         | [11-8]  |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | AES                          | [7-4]   |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | RES0                         | [3-0]   |    y    |
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+
+  2) ID_AA64ISAR1_EL1 - Instruction Set Attribute Register 1
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+     | Name                         |  bits   | visible |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | RES0                         | [63-0]  |    y    |
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+
+  3) ID_AA64PFR0_EL1 - Processor Feature Register 0
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+     | Name                         |  bits   | visible |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | RES0                         | [63-28] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | GIC                          | [27-24] |    n    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | AdvSIMD                      | [23-20] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | FP                           | [19-16] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | EL3                          | [15-12] |    n    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | EL2                          | [11-8]  |    n    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | EL1                          | [7-4]   |    n    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | EL0                          | [3-0]   |    n    |
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+
+  4) ID_AA64PFR1_EL1 - Processor Feature Register 1
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+     | Name                         |  bits   | visible |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | RES0                         | [63-0]  |    y    |
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+
+  5) MIDR_EL1 - Main ID Register
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+     | Name                         |  bits   | visible |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | RES0                         | [63-32] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | Implementer                  | [31-24] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | Variant                      | [23-20] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | Architecture                 | [19-16] |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | PartNum                      | [15-4]  |    y    |
+     |--------------------------------------------------|
+     | Revision                     | [3-0]   |    y    |
+     x--------------------------------------------------x
+
+   NOTE: The 'visible' fields of MIDR_EL1 will contain the value
+   as available on the CPU where it is fetched and is not a system
+   wide safe value.
+
diff --git a/arch/arm64/kernel/cpufeature.c b/arch/arm64/kernel/cpufeature.c
index 94c188f..fb331de 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/kernel/cpufeature.c
+++ b/arch/arm64/kernel/cpufeature.c
@@ -81,6 +81,10 @@ static bool __maybe_unused
 cpufeature_pan_not_uao(const struct arm64_cpu_capabilities *entry, int __unused);
 
 
+/*
+ * NOTE: Any changes to the visibility of features should be kept in
+ * sync with the documentation of the CPU feature register API.
+ */
 static const struct arm64_ftr_bits ftr_id_aa64isar0[] = {
 	ARM64_FTR_BITS(FTR_HIDDEN, FTR_STRICT, FTR_EXACT, ID_AA64ISAR0_RDM_SHIFT, 4, 0),
 	ARM64_FTR_BITS(FTR_VISIBLE, FTR_STRICT, FTR_LOWER_SAFE, ID_AA64ISAR0_ATOMICS_SHIFT, 4, 0),
-- 
2.7.4