3 Machine-Level ISA, Version 1.12
This chapter describes the machine-level operations available in machine-mode (M-mode), which is the highest privilege mode in a RISC-V system. M-mode is used for low-level access to a hardware platform and is the first mode entered at reset. M-mode can also be used to implement features that are too difficult or expensive to implement in hardware directly. The RISC-V machine-level ISA contains a common core that is extended depending on which other privilege levels are supported and other details of the hardware implementation.
3.1 Machine-Level CSRs
In addition to the machine-level CSRs described in this section, M-mode code can access all CSRs at lower privilege levels.
3.1.1 Machine ISA Register misa
The misa CSR is a WARL read-write register
reporting the ISA supported by the hart. This register must be
readable in any implementation, but a value of zero can be returned to
indicate the misa register has not been implemented, requiring
that CPU capabilities be determined through a separate non-standard
mechanism.
misa).The MXL (Machine XLEN) field encodes the native base integer ISA width
as shown in Table [misabase]. The MXL field may be writable in
implementations that support multiple base ISAs. The effective
XLEN in M-mode, MXLEN, is given by the setting of MXL, or has a
fixed value if misa is zero. The MXL field is always set to the
widest supported ISA variant at reset.
| MXL | XLEN |
|---|---|
| 1 | 32 |
| 2 | 64 |
| 3 | 128 |
The misa CSR is MXLEN bits wide. If the value read from misa is
nonzero, field MXL of that value always denotes the current MXLEN. If a write
to misa causes MXLEN to change, the position of MXL moves to the
most-significant two bits of misa at the new width.
The Extensions field encodes the presence of the standard extensions, with a single bit per letter of the alphabet (bit 0 encodes presence of extension “A” , bit 1 encodes presence of extension “B”, through to bit 25 which encodes “Z”). The “I” bit will be set for RV32I, RV64I, RV128I base ISAs, and the “E” bit will be set for RV32E. The Extensions field is a WARL field that can contain writable bits where the implementation allows the supported ISA to be modified. At reset, the Extensions field shall contain the maximal set of supported extensions, and I shall be selected over E if both are available.
When a standard extension is disabled by clearing its bit in misa, the instructions and CSRs defined or modified by the extension revert to their defined or reserved behaviors as if the extension is not implemented.
The design of the RV128I base ISA is not yet complete, and while much of the remainder of this specification is expected to apply to RV128, this version of the document focuses only on RV32 and RV64.
The “U” and “S” bits will be set if there is support for user and supervisor modes respectively.
The “X” bit will be set if there are any non-standard extensions.
| Bit | Character | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | A | Atomic extension |
| 1 | B | Tentatively reserved for Bit-Manipulation extension |
| 2 | C | Compressed extension |
| 3 | D | Double-precision floating-point extension |
| 4 | E | RV32E base ISA |
| 5 | F | Single-precision floating-point extension |
| 6 | G | Reserved |
| 7 | H | Hypervisor extension |
| 8 | I | RV32I/64I/128I base ISA |
| 9 | J | Tentatively reserved for Dynamically Translated Languages extension |
| 10 | K | Reserved |
| 11 | L | Reserved |
| 12 | M | Integer Multiply/Divide extension |
| 13 | N | Tentatively reserved for User-Level Interrupts extension |
| 14 | O | Reserved |
| 15 | P | Tentatively reserved for Packed-SIMD extension |
| 16 | Q | Quad-precision floating-point extension |
| 17 | R | Reserved |
| 18 | S | Supervisor mode implemented |
| 19 | T | Reserved |
| 20 | U | User mode implemented |
| 21 | V | Tentatively reserved for Vector extension |
| 22 | W | Reserved |
| 23 | X | Non-standard extensions present |
| 24 | Y | Reserved |
| 25 | Z | Reserved |
The misa CSR exposes a rudimentary catalog of CPU features
to machine-mode code. More extensive information can be obtained in
machine mode by probing other machine registers, and examining other
ROM storage in the system as part of the boot process.
We require that lower privilege levels execute environment calls instead of reading CPU registers to determine features available at each privilege level. This enables virtualization layers to alter the ISA observed at any level, and supports a much richer command interface without burdening hardware designs.
The “E” bit is read-only. Unless misa is all read-only zero, the “E”
bit always reads as the complement of the “I” bit. An implementation that
supports both RV32E and RV32I can select RV32E by clearing the “I” bit.
If an ISA feature x depends on an ISA feature y, then attempting to enable feature x but disable feature y results in both features being disabled. For example, setting “F”=0 and “D”=1 results in both “F” and “D” being cleared.
An implementation may impose additional constraints on the collective setting
of two or more misa fields, in which case they function collectively as
a single WARL field. An attempt to write an unsupported combination causes
those bits to be set to some supported combination.
Writing misa may increase IALIGN, e.g., by disabling the “C”
extension.
If an instruction that would write misa increases IALIGN, and
the subsequent instruction’s address is not IALIGN-bit aligned, the
write to misa is suppressed, leaving misa unchanged.
When software enables an extension that was previously disabled, then all state uniquely associated with that extension is , unless otherwise specified by that extension.
3.1.2 Machine Vendor ID Register mvendorid
The mvendorid CSR is a 32-bit read-only register providing
the JEDEC manufacturer ID of the provider of the core. This register
must be readable in any implementation, but a value of 0 can be
returned to indicate the field is not implemented or that this is a
non-commercial implementation.
mvendorid).JEDEC manufacturer IDs are ordinarily encoded as a sequence of one-byte
continuation codes 0x7f, terminated by a one-byte ID not equal to
0x7f, with an odd parity bit in the most-significant bit of each byte.
mvendorid encodes the number of one-byte continuation
codes in the Bank field, and encodes the final byte in the Offset field,
discarding the parity bit. For example, the JEDEC manufacturer ID
0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x7f 0x8a
(twelve continuation codes followed by 0x8a) would be encoded in the
mvendorid CSR as 0x60a.
In JEDEC’s parlance, the bank number is one greater than the number of
continuation codes; hence, the mvendorid Bank field encodes a value
that is one less than the JEDEC bank number.
Previously the vendor ID was to be a number allocated by RISC-V International, but this duplicates the work of JEDEC in maintaining a manufacturer ID standard. At time of writing, registering a manufacturer ID with JEDEC has a one-time cost of $500.
3.1.3 Machine Architecture ID Register marchid
The marchid CSR is an MXLEN-bit read-only register encoding the
base microarchitecture of the hart. This register must be readable in
any implementation, but a value of 0 can be returned to indicate the
field is not implemented. The combination of mvendorid and marchid should uniquely identify the type of hart microarchitecture
that is implemented.
marchid).Open-source project architecture IDs are allocated globally by RISC-V International, and have non-zero architecture IDs with a zero most-significant-bit (MSB). Commercial architecture IDs are allocated by each commercial vendor independently, but must have the MSB set and cannot contain zero in the remaining MXLEN-1 bits.
The intent is for the architecture ID to represent the microarchitecture associated with the repo around which development occurs rather than a particular organization. Commercial fabrications of open-source designs should (and might be required by the license to) retain the original architecture ID. This will aid in reducing fragmentation and tool support costs, as well as provide attribution. Open-source architecture IDs are administered by RISC-V International and should only be allocated to released, functioning open-source projects. Commercial architecture IDs can be managed independently by any registered vendor but are required to have IDs disjoint from the open-source architecture IDs (MSB set) to prevent collisions if a vendor wishes to use both closed-source and open-source microarchitectures.
The convention adopted within the following Implementation field can
be used to segregate branches of the same architecture design,
including by organization. The misa register also helps
distinguish different variants of a design.
3.1.4 Machine Implementation ID Register mimpid
The mimpid CSR provides a unique encoding of the version of the
processor implementation. This register must be readable in any
implementation, but a value of 0 can be returned to indicate that the
field is not implemented. The Implementation value should reflect the
design of the RISC-V processor itself and not any surrounding system.
mimpid).The format of this field is left to the provider of the architecture source code, but will often be printed by standard tools as a hexadecimal string without any leading or trailing zeros, so the Implementation value can be left-justified (i.e., filled in from most-significant nibble down) with subfields aligned on nibble boundaries to ease human readability.
3.1.5 Hart ID Register mhartid
The mhartid CSR is an MXLEN-bit read-only register
containing the integer ID of the hardware thread running the code.
This register must be readable in any implementation. Hart IDs might
not necessarily be numbered contiguously in a multiprocessor system,
but at least one hart must have a hart ID of zero. Hart IDs must be
unique within the execution environment.
mhartid).In certain cases, we must ensure exactly one hart runs some code (e.g., at reset), and so require one hart to have a known hart ID of zero.
For efficiency, system implementers should aim to reduce the magnitude of the largest hart ID used in a system.
3.1.6 Machine Status Registers (mstatus and mstatush)
The mstatus register is an MXLEN-bit read/write register
formatted as shown in Figure 1.6 for RV32 and
Figure 1.7 for RV64. The mstatus
register keeps track of and controls the hart’s current operating
state. A restricted view of mstatus appears as the
sstatus register in the S-level ISA.
mstatus) for RV32.
mstatus) for RV64.For RV32 only, mstatush is a 32-bit read/write register formatted
as shown in Figure 1.8.
Bits 30:4 of mstatush generally contain the same fields found in
bits 62:36 of mstatus for RV64.
Fields SD, SXL, and UXL do not exist in mstatush.
mstatush) for RV32.3.1.6.1 Privilege and Global Interrupt-Enable Stack in mstatus register
Global interrupt-enable bits, MIE and SIE, are provided for M-mode and S-mode respectively. These bits are primarily used to guarantee atomicity with respect to interrupt handlers in the current privilege mode.
The global xIE bits are located in the low-order bits of mstatus,
allowing them to be atomically set or cleared with a single CSR
instruction.
When a hart is executing in privilege mode x, interrupts are globally enabled when xIE=1 and globally disabled when xIE=0. Interrupts for lower-privilege modes, w<x, are always globally disabled regardless of the setting of any global wIE bit for the lower-privilege mode. Interrupts for higher-privilege modes, y>x, are always globally enabled regardless of the setting of the global yIE bit for the higher-privilege mode. Higher-privilege-level code can use separate per-interrupt enable bits to disable selected higher-privilege-mode interrupts before ceding control to a lower-privilege mode.
A higher-privilege mode y could disable all of its interrupts before ceding control to a lower-privilege mode but this would be unusual as it would leave only a synchronous trap, non-maskable interrupt, or reset as means to regain control of the hart.
To support nested traps, each privilege mode x that can respond to interrupts has a two-level stack of interrupt-enable bits and privilege modes. xPIE holds the value of the interrupt-enable bit active prior to the trap, and xPP holds the previous privilege mode. The xPP fields can only hold privilege modes up to x, so MPP is two bits wide and SPP is one bit wide. When a trap is taken from privilege mode y into privilege mode x, xPIE is set to the value of xIE; xIE is set to 0; and xPP is set to y.
For lower privilege modes, any trap (synchronous or asynchronous) is usually taken at a higher privilege mode with interrupts disabled upon entry. The higher-level trap handler will either service the trap and return using the stacked information, or, if not returning immediately to the interrupted context, will save the privilege stack before re-enabling interrupts, so only one entry per stack is required.
An MRET or SRET instruction is used to return from a trap in M-mode or S-mode respectively. When executing an xRET instruction, supposing xPP holds the value y, xIE is set to xPIE; the privilege mode is changed to y; xPIE is set to 1; and xPP is set to the least-privileged supported mode (U if U-mode is implemented, else M). If xPP≠M, xRET also sets MPRV=0.
Setting xPP to the least-privileged supported mode on an xRET helps identify software bugs in the management of the two-level privilege-mode stack.
xPP fields are WARL fields that can hold only privilege mode x and any implemented privilege mode lower than x. If privilege mode x is not implemented, then xPP must be read-only 0.
M-mode software can determine whether a privilege mode is implemented by writing that mode to MPP then reading it back.
If the machine provides only U and M modes, then only a single hardware storage bit is required to represent either 00 or 11 in MPP.
3.1.6.2 Base ISA Control in mstatus Register
For RV64 systems, the SXL and UXL fields are WARL fields
that control the value of XLEN for S-mode and U-mode,
respectively. The encoding of these fields is the same as the MXL
field of misa, shown in Table [misabase]. The effective
XLEN in S-mode and U-mode are termed SXLEN and UXLEN,
respectively.
For RV32 systems, the SXL and UXL fields do not exist, and SXLEN=32 and UXLEN=32.
For RV64 systems, if S-mode is not supported, then SXL is read-only zero. Otherwise, it is a WARL field that encodes the current value of SXLEN. In particular, an implementation may make SXL be a read-only field whose value always ensures that SXLEN=MXLEN.
For RV64 systems, if U-mode is not supported, then UXL is read-only zero. Otherwise, it is a WARL field that encodes the current value of UXLEN. In particular, an implementation may make UXL be a read-only field whose value always ensures that UXLEN=MXLEN or UXLEN=SXLEN.
Whenever XLEN in any mode is set to a value less than the widest
supported XLEN, all operations must ignore source operand register
bits above the configured XLEN, and must sign-extend results to fill
the entire widest supported XLEN in the destination register.
Similarly, pc bits above XLEN are ignored, and when the pc
is written, it is sign-extended to fill the widest supported XLEN.
We require that operations always fill the entire underlying hardware registers with defined values to avoid implementation-defined behavior.
To reduce hardware complexity, the architecture imposes no checks that lower-privilege modes have XLEN settings less than or equal to the next-higher privilege mode. In practice, such settings would almost always be a software bug, but machine operation is well-defined even in this case.
If MXLEN is changed from 32 to a wider width, each of mstatus fields SXL and
UXL, if not restricted to a single value, gets the value corresponding to the
widest supported width not wider than the new MXLEN.
3.1.6.3 Memory Privilege in mstatus Register
The MPRV (Modify PRiVilege) bit modifies the effective privilege mode, i.e., the privilege level at which loads and stores execute. When MPRV=0, loads and stores behave as normal, using the translation and protection mechanisms of the current privilege mode. When MPRV=1, load and store memory addresses are translated and protected, and endianness is applied, as though the current privilege mode were set to MPP. Instruction address-translation and protection are unaffected by the setting of MPRV. MPRV is read-only 0 if U-mode is not supported.
An MRET or SRET instruction that changes the privilege mode to a mode less privileged than M also sets MPRV=0.
The MXR (Make eXecutable Readable) bit modifies the privilege with which loads access virtual memory. When MXR=0, only loads from pages marked readable (R=1 in Figure [sv32pte]) will succeed. When MXR=1, loads from pages marked either readable or executable (R=1 or X=1) will succeed. MXR has no effect when page-based virtual memory is not in effect. MXR is read-only 0 if S-mode is not supported.
The MPRV and MXR mechanisms were conceived to improve the efficiency of M-mode routines that emulate missing hardware features, e.g., misaligned loads and stores. MPRV obviates the need to perform address translation in software. MXR allows instruction words to be loaded from pages marked execute-only.
The current privilege mode and the privilege mode specified by MPP might have different XLEN settings. When MPRV=1, load and store memory addresses are treated as though the current XLEN were set to MPP’s XLEN, following the rules in Section 1.1.6.2.
The SUM (permit Supervisor User Memory access) bit modifies the privilege with
which S-mode loads and stores access virtual memory.
When SUM=0, S-mode memory accesses to pages that are accessible by U-mode (U=1
in Figure [sv32pte]) will fault. When SUM=1, these accesses are
permitted. SUM has no effect when page-based virtual memory is not in effect.
Note that, while SUM is ordinarily ignored when not executing in S-mode, it
is in effect when MPRV=1 and MPP=S. SUM is read-only 0 if S-mode is
not supported or if satp.MODE is read-only 0.
The MXR and SUM mechanisms only affect the interpretation of permissions encoded in page-table entries. In particular, they have no impact on whether access-fault exceptions are raised due to PMAs or PMP.
3.1.6.4 Endianness Control in mstatus and mstatush Registers
The MBE, SBE, and UBE bits in mstatus and mstatush are
WARL fields that control the endianness of memory accesses other than
instruction fetches.
Instruction fetches are always little-endian.
MBE controls whether non-instruction-fetch memory accesses made from
M-mode (assuming mstatus.MPRV=0) are little-endian (MBE=0) or
big-endian (MBE=1).
If S-mode is not supported, SBE is read-only 0. Otherwise, SBE controls whether explicit load and store memory accesses made from S-mode are little-endian (SBE=0) or big-endian (SBE=1).
If U-mode is not supported, UBE is read-only 0. Otherwise, UBE controls whether explicit load and store memory accesses made from U-mode are little-endian (UBE=0) or big-endian (UBE=1).
For implicit accesses to supervisor-level memory management data
structures, such as page tables, endianness is always controlled by SBE.
Since changing SBE alters the implementation’s interpretation of these data
structures, if any such data structures remain in use across a change to SBE,
M-mode software must follow such a change to SBE by executing an
SFENCE.VMA instruction with rs1=x0 and rs2=x0.
Only in contrived scenarios will a given memory-management data structure be interpreted as both little-endian and big-endian. In practice, SBE will only be changed at runtime on world switches, in which case neither the old nor new memory-management data structure will be reinterpreted in a different endianness. In this case, no additional SFENCE.VMA is necessary, beyond what would ordinarily be required for a world switch.
If S-mode is supported, an implementation may make SBE be a read-only copy of MBE. If U-mode is supported, an implementation may make UBE be a read-only copy of either MBE or SBE.
An implementation supports only little-endian memory accesses if fields MBE, SBE, and UBE are all read-only 0. An implementation supports only big-endian memory accesses (aside from instruction fetches) if MBE is read-only 1 and SBE and UBE are each read-only 1 when S-mode and U-mode are supported.
Volume I defines a hart’s address space as a circular sequence of 2XLEN bytes at consecutive addresses. The correspondence between addresses and byte locations is fixed and not affected by any endianness mode. Rather, the applicable endianness mode determines the order of mapping between memory bytes and a multibyte quantity (halfword, word, etc.).
Standard RISC-V ABIs are expected to be purely little-endian-only or big-endian-only, with no accommodation for mixing endianness. Nevertheless, endianness control has been defined so as to permit, for instance, an OS of one endianness to execute user-mode programs of the opposite endianness. Consideration has been given also to the possibility of nonstandard usages whereby software flips the endianness of memory accesses as needed.
RISC-V instructions are uniformly little-endian to decouple instruction encoding from the current endianness settings, for the benefit of both hardware and software. Otherwise, for instance, a RISC-V assembler or disassembler would always need to know the intended active endianness, despite that the endianness mode might change dynamically during execution. In contrast, by giving instructions a fixed endianness, it is sometimes possible for carefully written software to be endianness-agnostic even in binary form, much like position-independent code.
The choice to have instructions be only little-endian does have consequences, however, for RISC-V software that encodes or decodes machine instructions. In big-endian mode, such software must account for the fact that explicit loads and stores have endianness opposite that of instructions, for example by swapping byte order after loads and before stores.
3.1.6.5 Virtualization Support in mstatus Register
The TVM (Trap Virtual Memory) bit is a WARL field that supports intercepting
supervisor virtual-memory management operations. When TVM=1,
attempts to read or write the satp CSR or execute an SFENCE.VMA or
SINVAL.VMA instruction while executing in S-mode will raise an illegal instruction
exception. When TVM=0, these operations are permitted in S-mode.
TVM is read-only 0 when S-mode is not supported.
The TVM mechanism improves virtualization efficiency by permitting guest operating systems to execute in S-mode, rather than classically virtualizing them in U-mode. This approach obviates the need to trap accesses to most S-mode CSRs.
Trapping satp accesses and the SFENCE.VMA and SINVAL.VMA instructions
provides the hooks necessary to lazily populate shadow page tables.
The TW (Timeout Wait) bit is a WARL field that supports intercepting the WFI instruction (see Section 1.3.3). When TW=0, the WFI instruction may execute in lower privilege modes when not prevented for some other reason. When TW=1, then if WFI is executed in any less-privileged mode, and it does not complete within an implementation-specific, bounded time limit, the WFI instruction causes an illegal instruction exception. The time limit may always be 0, in which case WFI always causes an illegal instruction exception in less-privileged modes when TW=1. TW is read-only 0 when there are no modes less privileged than M.
Trapping the WFI instruction can trigger a world switch to another guest OS, rather than wastefully idling in the current guest.
When S-mode is implemented, then executing WFI in U-mode causes an illegal instruction exception, unless it completes within an implementation-specific, bounded time limit. A future revision of this specification might add a feature that allows S-mode to selectively permit WFI in U-mode. Such a feature would only be active when TW=0.
The TSR (Trap SRET) bit is a WARL field that supports intercepting the supervisor exception return instruction, SRET. When TSR=1, attempts to execute SRET while executing in S-mode will raise an illegal instruction exception. When TSR=0, this operation is permitted in S-mode. TSR is read-only 0 when S-mode is not supported.
Trapping SRET is necessary to emulate the hypervisor extension (see Chapter [hypervisor]) on implementations that do not provide it.
3.1.6.6 Extension Context Status in mstatus Register
Supporting substantial extensions is one of the primary goals of RISC-V, and hence we define a standard interface to allow unchanged privileged-mode code, particularly a supervisor-level OS, to support arbitrary user-mode state extensions.
To date, the V extension is the only standard extension that defines additional state beyond the floating-point CSR and data registers.
The FS[1:0] and VS[1:0] WARL fields and the XS[1:0] read-only field are used
to reduce the cost of context save and restore by setting and tracking
the current state of the floating-point unit and any other user-mode
extensions respectively.
The FS field encodes the status of the floating-point unit state, including
the floating-point registers f0–f31 and the CSRs
fcsr, frm, and fflags.
The VS field encodes the status of the vector extension state, including
the vector registers v0–v31 and the CSRs
vcsr, vxrm, vxsat, vstart, vl, vtype,
and vlenb.
The XS field encodes the
status of additional user-mode extensions and associated state.
These fields can be checked by a context switch routine to quickly
determine whether a state save or restore is required. If a save or
restore is required, additional instructions and CSRs are typically
required to effect and optimize the process.
The design anticipates that most context switches will not need to save/restore state in either or both of the floating-point unit or other extensions, so provides a fast check via the SD bit.
The FS, VS, and XS fields use the same status encoding as shown in Table [fsxsencoding], with the four possible status values being Off, Initial, Clean, and Dirty.
| Status | FS and VS Meaning | XS Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Off | All off |
| 1 | Initial | None dirty or clean, some on |
| 2 | Clean | None dirty, some clean |
| 3 | Dirty | Some dirty |
If the F extension is implemented, the FS field shall not be read-only zero.
If neither the F extension nor S-mode is implemented, then FS is read-only zero. If S-mode is implemented but the F extension is not, FS may optionally be read-only zero.
Implementations with S-mode but without the F extension are permitted, but not required, to make the FS field be read-only zero. Some such implementations will choose not to have the FS field be read-only zero, so as to enable emulation of the F extension for both S-mode and U-mode via invisible traps into M-mode.
If the v registers are implemented, the VS field shall not be
read-only zero.
If neither the v registers nor S-mode is implemented, then VS
is read-only zero.
If S-mode is implemented but the v registers are not, VS may
optionally be read-only zero.
In systems without additional user extensions requiring new state, the XS field is read-only zero. Every additional extension with state provides a CSR field that encodes the equivalent of the XS states. The XS field represents a summary of all extensions’ status as shown in Table [fsxsencoding].
The XS field effectively reports the maximum status value across all user-extension status fields, though individual extensions can use a different encoding than XS.
The SD bit is a read-only bit that summarizes whether either the FS, VS, or XS fields signal the presence of some dirty state that will require saving extended user context to memory. If FS, XS, and VS are all read-only zero, then SD is also always zero.
When an extension’s status is set to Off, any instruction that attempts to read or write the corresponding state will cause an illegal instruction exception. When the status is Initial, the corresponding state should have an initial constant value. When the status is Clean, the corresponding state is potentially different from the initial value, but matches the last value stored on a context swap. When the status is Dirty, the corresponding state has potentially been modified since the last context save.
During a context save, the responsible privileged code need only write out the corresponding state if its status is Dirty, and can then reset the extension’s status to Clean. During a context restore, the context need only be loaded from memory if the status is Clean (it should never be Dirty at restore). If the status is Initial, the context must be set to an initial constant value on context restore to avoid a security hole, but this can be done without accessing memory. For example, the floating-point registers can all be initialized to the immediate value 0.
The FS and XS fields are read by the privileged code before saving the context. The FS field is set directly by privileged code when resuming a user context, while the XS field is set indirectly by writing to the status register of the individual extensions. The status fields will also be updated during execution of instructions, regardless of privilege mode.
Extensions to the user-mode ISA often include additional user-mode state, and this state can be considerably larger than the base integer registers. The extensions might only be used for some applications, or might only be needed for short phases within a single application. To improve performance, the user-mode extension can define additional instructions to allow user-mode software to return the unit to an initial state or even to turn off the unit.
For example, a coprocessor might require to be configured before use and can be “unconfigured” after use. The unconfigured state would be represented as the Initial state for context save. If the same application remains running between the unconfigure and the next configure (which would set status to Dirty), there is no need to actually reinitialize the state at the unconfigure instruction, as all state is local to the user process, i.e., the Initial state may only cause the coprocessor state to be initialized to a constant value at context restore, not at every unconfigure.
Executing a user-mode instruction to disable a unit and place it into the Off state will cause an illegal instruction exception to be raised if any subsequent instruction tries to use the unit before it is turned back on. A user-mode instruction to turn a unit on must also ensure the unit’s state is properly initialized, as the unit might have been used by another context meantime.
Changing the setting of FS has no effect on the contents of the floating-point register state. In particular, setting FS=Off does not destroy the state, nor does setting FS=Initial clear the contents. Similarly, the setting of VS has no effect on the contents of the vector register state. Other extensions, however, might not preserve state when set to Off.
Implementations may choose to track the dirtiness of the floating-point register state imprecisely by reporting the state to be dirty even when it has not been modified. On some implementations, some instructions that do not mutate the floating-point state may cause the state to transition from Initial or Clean to Dirty. On other implementations, dirtiness might not be tracked at all, in which case the valid FS states are Off and Dirty, and an attempt to set FS to Initial or Clean causes it to be set to Dirty.
This definition of FS does not disallow setting FS to Dirty as a result of errant speculation. Some platforms may choose to disallow speculatively writing FS to close a potential side channel.
If an instruction explicitly or implicitly writes a floating-point register or
the fcsr but does not alter its contents, and FS=Initial or FS=Clean, it
is implementation-defined whether FS transitions to Dirty.
Implementations may choose to track the dirtiness of the vector register state in an analogous imprecise fashion, including possibly setting VS to Dirty when software attempts to set VS=Initial or VS=Clean. When VS=Initial or VS=Clean, it is implementation-defined whether an instruction that writes a vector register or vector CSR but does not alter its contents causes VS to transition to Dirty.
Table 1.9 shows all the possible state transitions for the FS, VS, or XS status bits. Note that the standard floating-point and vector extensions do not support user-mode unconfigure or disable/enable instructions.
Standard privileged instructions to initialize, save, and restore extension state are provided to insulate privileged code from details of the added extension state by treating the state as an opaque object.
Many coprocessor extensions are only used in limited contexts that allows software to safely unconfigure or even disable units when done. This reduces the context-switch overhead of large stateful coprocessors.
We separate out floating-point state from other extension state, as when a floating-point unit is present the floating-point registers are part of the standard calling convention, and so user-mode software cannot know when it is safe to disable the floating-point unit.
The XS field provides a summary of all added extension state, but additional microarchitectural bits might be maintained in the extension to further reduce context save and restore overhead.
The SD bit is read-only and is set when either the FS, VS, or XS bits encode a Dirty state (i.e., SD=((FS==11) OR (XS==11) OR (VS==11))). This allows privileged code to quickly determine when no additional context save is required beyond the integer register set and PC.
The floating-point unit state is always initialized, saved, and
restored using standard instructions (F, D, and/or Q), and privileged
code must be aware of FLEN to determine the appropriate space to
reserve for each f register.
Machine and Supervisor modes share a single copy of the FS, VS, and XS bits. Supervisor-level software normally uses the FS, VS, and XS bits directly to record the status with respect to the supervisor-level saved context. Machine-level software must be more conservative in saving and restoring the extension state in their corresponding version of the context.
In any reasonable use case, the number of context switches between user and supervisor level should far outweigh the number of context switches to other privilege levels. Note that coprocessors should not require their context to be saved and restored to service asynchronous interrupts, unless the interrupt results in a user-level context swap.
3.1.7 Machine Trap-Vector Base-Address Register (mtvec)
The mtvec register is an MXLEN-bit WARL read/write register that holds
trap vector configuration, consisting of a vector base address (BASE) and a
vector mode (MODE).
mtvec).The mtvec register must always be implemented, but can contain
a read-only value. If mtvec is writable, the set of values
the register may hold can vary by implementation. The value in the BASE field
must always be aligned on a 4-byte boundary, and the MODE setting may impose
additional alignment constraints on the value in the BASE field.
We allow for considerable flexibility in implementation of the trap vector base address. On the one hand, we do not wish to burden low-end implementations with a large number of state bits, but on the other hand, we wish to allow flexibility for larger systems.
| Value | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Direct | All exceptions set pc to BASE. |
| 1 | Vectored | Asynchronous interrupts set pc to BASE+4×cause. |
| ≥2 | — | Reserved |
The encoding of the MODE field is shown in Table [mtvec-mode]. When
MODE=Direct, all traps into machine mode cause the pc to be set to the
address in the BASE field. When MODE=Vectored, all synchronous exceptions
into machine mode cause the pc to be set to the address in the BASE
field, whereas interrupts cause the pc to be set to the address in
the BASE field plus four times the interrupt cause number. For example,
a machine-mode timer interrupt (see Table [mcauses]) causes the pc
to be set to BASE+0x1c.
When vectored interrupts are enabled, interrupt cause 0, which corresponds to user-mode software interrupts, are vectored to the same location as synchronous exceptions. This ambiguity does not arise in practice, since user-mode software interrupts are either disabled or delegated to user mode.
An implementation may have different alignment constraints for different modes. In particular, MODE=Vectored may have stricter alignment constraints than MODE=Direct.
Allowing coarser alignments in Vectored mode enables vectoring to be implemented without a hardware adder circuit.
Reset and NMI vector locations are given in a platform specification.
3.1.8 Machine Trap Delegation Registers (medeleg and mideleg)
By default, all traps at any privilege level are handled in machine
mode, though a machine-mode handler can redirect traps back to the
appropriate level with the MRET instruction (Section 1.3.2).
To increase performance, implementations can provide individual
read/write bits within medeleg and mideleg to indicate
that certain exceptions and interrupts should be processed directly by
a lower privilege level. The machine exception delegation register
(medeleg) and machine interrupt delegation register ( mideleg) are MXLEN-bit read/write registers.
In systems with S-mode, the medeleg and mideleg registers
must exist, and setting a bit in
medeleg or mideleg will delegate the corresponding trap, when
occurring in S-mode or U-mode, to the S-mode trap handler.
In systems without S-mode, the medeleg and mideleg registers
should not exist.
In versions 1.9.1 and earlier , these registers existed but were
hardwired to zero in M-mode only, or M/U without N systems. There
is no reason to require they return zero in those cases, as the misa register indicates whether they exist.
When a trap is delegated to S-mode, the
scause register is written with the trap cause; the
sepc register is written with the virtual address of
the instruction that took the trap; the
stval register is written with an
exception-specific datum; the SPP field
of mstatus is written with the active privilege mode at the time of
the trap; the SPIE field of mstatus is written with the
value of the SIE field at the time of the trap; and
the SIE field of mstatus is cleared.
The mcause, mepc, and mtval registers and the MPP and
MPIE fields of mstatus are not written.
An
implementation can choose to subset the delegatable traps, with the
supported delegatable bits found by writing one to every bit location,
then reading back the value in medeleg or mideleg to see
which bit positions hold a one.
An implementation shall not have any bits of medeleg be read-only one, i.e.,
any synchronous trap that can be delegated must support not being delegated.
Similarly, an implementation shall not fix as read-only one any bits of
mideleg corresponding to machine-level interrupts (but may do so
for lower-level interrupts).
Version 1.11 and earlier prohibited having any bits of mideleg
be read-only one.
Platform standards may always add such restrictions.
Traps never transition from a more-privileged mode to a less-privileged mode. For example, if M-mode has delegated illegal instruction exceptions to S-mode, and M-mode software later executes an illegal instruction, the trap is taken in M-mode, rather than being delegated to S-mode. By contrast, traps may be taken horizontally. Using the same example, if M-mode has delegated illegal instruction exceptions to S-mode, and S-mode software later executes an illegal instruction, the trap is taken in S-mode.
Delegated interrupts result in the interrupt being masked at the delegator
privilege level. For example, if the supervisor timer interrupt (STI) is
delegated to S-mode by setting mideleg[5], STIs will not be taken when
executing in M-mode. By contrast, if mideleg[5] is clear, STIs can
be taken in any mode and regardless of current mode will transfer control to
M-mode.
medeleg.medeleg has a bit position allocated for every synchronous exception
shown in Table [mcauses], with the index of the bit position equal to the
value returned in the mcause register (i.e., setting bit 8 allows
user-mode environment calls to be delegated to a lower-privilege trap
handler).
mideleg.mideleg holds trap delegation bits for individual interrupts, with the
layout of bits matching those in the mip register (i.e., STIP interrupt
delegation control is located in bit 5).
For exceptions that cannot occur in less privileged modes, the corresponding
medeleg bits should be read-only zero. In particular,
medeleg[11] is read-only zero.
3.1.9 Machine Interrupt Registers (mip and mie)
The mip register is an MXLEN-bit read/write register containing
information on pending interrupts, while mie is the
corresponding MXLEN-bit read/write register containing interrupt enable
bits.
Interrupt cause number i (as reported in CSR mcause,
Section 1.1.15) corresponds with bit i in both
mip and mie.
Bits 15:0 are allocated to standard interrupt causes only, while bits 16
and above are designated for platform or custom use.
mip).
mie).An interrupt i will trap to M-mode (causing the privilege mode
to change to M-mode) if all of the following are true:
(a) either the current privilege mode is M and the MIE bit in the
mstatus register is set, or the current privilege mode has less
privilege than M-mode;
(b) bit i is set in both mip and mie; and
(c) if register mideleg exists, bit i is not set in
mideleg.
These conditions for an interrupt trap to occur must be evaluated in a bounded
amount of time from when an interrupt becomes, or ceases to be,
pending in mip, and must
also be evaluated immediately following the execution of an xRET
instruction or an explicit write to a CSR on which these interrupt trap
conditions expressly depend (including mip, mie, mstatus,
and mideleg).
Interrupts to M-mode take priority over any interrupts to lower privilege modes.
Each individual bit in register mip may be writable or may be
read-only.
When bit i in mip is writable, a pending interrupt
i can be cleared by writing 0 to this bit.
If interrupt i can become pending but bit i in
mip is read-only, the implementation must provide some other
mechanism for clearing the pending interrupt.
A bit in mie must be writable if the corresponding interrupt can
ever become pending.
Bits of mie that are not writable must be read-only zero.
The standard portions (bits 15:0) of registers mip and mie
are formatted as shown in Figures 1.15 and
1.16 respectively.
mip.
mie.The machine-level interrupt registers handle a few root interrupt sources which are assigned a fixed service priority for simplicity, while separate external interrupt controllers can implement a more complex prioritization scheme over a much larger set of interrupts that are then muxed into the machine-level interrupt sources.
The non-maskable interrupt is not made visible via the mip
register as its presence is implicitly known when executing the NMI
trap handler.
Bits mip.MEIP and mie.MEIE are the interrupt-pending and
interrupt-enable bits for machine-level external interrupts.
MEIP is read-only in mip, and is set and cleared by a
platform-specific interrupt controller.
Bits mip.MTIP and mie.MTIE are the interrupt-pending and
interrupt-enable bits for machine timer interrupts.
MTIP is read-only in mip, and is cleared by writing to the memory-mapped
machine-mode timer compare register.
Bits mip.MSIP and mie.MSIE are the interrupt-pending and
interrupt-enable bits for machine-level software interrupts.
MSIP is read-only in mip, and is written by accesses
to memory-mapped control registers, which are used by remote harts to
provide machine-level interprocessor interrupts.
A hart can write its
own MSIP bit using the same memory-mapped control register.
If a system has only one hart, or if a platform standard supports the
delivery of machine-level interprocessor interrupts through external
interrupts (MEI) instead, then mip.MSIP and mie.MSIE may
both be read-only zeros.
If supervisor mode is not implemented, bits SEIP, STIP, and SSIP of
mip and SEIE, STIE, and SSIE of mie are read-only zeros.
If supervisor mode is implemented, bits mip.SEIP and mie.SEIE
are the interrupt-pending and interrupt-enable bits for supervisor-level
external interrupts.
SEIP is writable in mip, and
may be written by M-mode software to indicate to S-mode that an
external interrupt is pending. Additionally, the platform-level
interrupt controller may generate supervisor-level external interrupts.
Supervisor-level external interrupts are made pending based on the
logical-OR of the software-writable SEIP bit and the signal from the
external interrupt controller.
When mip is read with a CSR instruction,
the value of the SEIP bit returned in the rd destination
register is the logical-OR of the software-writable bit and the
interrupt signal from the interrupt controller, but the signal from the
interrupt controller is not used to calculate the value written to SEIP.
Only the software-writable SEIP bit participates in the
read-modify-write sequence of a CSRRS or CSRRC instruction.
For example, if we name the software-writable SEIP bit B and the
signal from the external interrupt controller E, then if csrrs t0, mip, t1 is executed, t0[9] is written with B || E , then
B is written with B || t1[9] .
If csrrw t0, mip, t1 is executed, then t0[9] is written with
B || E , and B is simply written with t1[9].
In neither case does B depend upon E.
The SEIP field behavior is designed to allow a higher privilege layer to mimic external interrupts cleanly, without losing any real external interrupts. The behavior of the CSR instructions is slightly modified from regular CSR accesses as a result.
If supervisor mode is implemented, bits mip.STIP and mie.STIE
are the interrupt-pending and interrupt-enable bits for supervisor-level
timer interrupts.
STIP is writable in mip, and may be
written by M-mode software to deliver timer interrupts to S-mode.
If supervisor mode is implemented, bits mip.SSIP and mie.SSIE
are the interrupt-pending and interrupt-enable bits for supervisor-level
software interrupts.
SSIP is writable in mip and may also be set to 1 by a platform-specific
interrupt controller.
Multiple simultaneous interrupts destined for M-mode are handled in the following decreasing priority order: MEI, MSI, MTI, SEI, SSI, STI.
The machine-level interrupt fixed-priority ordering rules were developed with the following rationale.
Interrupts for higher privilege modes must be serviced before interrupts for lower privilege modes to support preemption.
The platform-specific machine-level interrupt sources in bits 16 and above have platform-specific priority, but are typically chosen to have the highest service priority to support very fast local vectored interrupts.
External interrupts are handled before internal (timer/software) interrupts as external interrupts are usually generated by devices that might require low interrupt service times.
Software interrupts are handled before internal timer interrupts,
because internal timer interrupts are usually intended for time
slicing, where time precision is less important, whereas software
interrupts are used for inter-processor messaging. Software
interrupts can be avoided when high-precision timing is required, or
high-precision timer interrupts can be routed via a different
interrupt path.
Software interrupts are located in the lowest four bits of mip
as these are often written by software, and this position allows the
use of a single CSR instruction with a five-bit immediate.
Restricted views of the mip and mie registers appear as
the sip and sie registers for supervisor level.
If an interrupt is delegated to
S-mode by setting a bit in the mideleg register,
it becomes visible in the sip register and is maskable
using the sie register. Otherwise, the corresponding
bits in sip and sie are read-only
zero.
3.1.10 Hardware Performance Monitor
M-mode includes a basic hardware performance-monitoring facility. The
mcycle CSR counts the number of clock cycles executed by the
processor core on which the hart is running.
The minstret CSR counts the number of instructions the hart has
retired. The mcycle and minstret registers have 64-bit
precision on all RV32 and RV64 systems.
The counter registers have an arbitrary value after the hart is reset, and
can be written with a given value. Any CSR write takes effect after
the writing instruction has otherwise completed.
The mcycle CSR may be shared between harts on the same core, in which
case writes to mcycle will be visible to those harts.
The platform should provide a mechanism to indicate which harts share an mcycle CSR.
The hardware performance monitor includes 29 additional 64-bit event counters, mhpmcounter3–mhpmcounter31. The event selector CSRs, mhpmevent3–mhpmevent31, are MXLEN-bit WARL registers that control which event
causes the corresponding counter to increment. The meaning of these events is
defined by the platform, but event 0 is defined to mean “no event.”
All counters should be implemented, but a legal implementation is to make
both the counter and its corresponding event selector be read-only 0.
The mhpmcounters are WARL registers that support up to 64 bits of
precision on RV32 and RV64.
A future revision of this specification will define a mechanism to generate an interrupt when a hardware performance monitor counter overflows.
When MXLEN=32, reads of the mcycle, minstret, and mhpmcountern CSRs return bits 31–0 of the corresponding counter, and
writes change only bits 31–0; reads of the mcycleh, minstreth,
and mhpmcounternh CSRs return bits 63–32 of the corresponding
counter, and writes change only bits 63–32.
3.1.11 Machine Counter-Enable Register (mcounteren)
The counter-enable register mcounteren is a 32-bit register that
controls the availability of the hardware performance-monitoring counters to
the next-lowest privileged mode.
mcounteren).The settings in this register only control accessibility. The act of reading or writing this register does not affect the underlying counters, which continue to increment even when not accessible.
When the CY, TM, IR, or HPMn bit in the mcounteren
register is clear, attempts to read the cycle, time, instret, or hpmcountern register while executing in
S-mode or U-mode will cause an illegal instruction exception. When
one of these bits is set, access to the corresponding register is
permitted in the next implemented privilege mode (S-mode if
implemented, otherwise U-mode).
The counter-enable bits support two common use cases with minimal hardware. For systems that do not need high-performance timers and counters, machine-mode software can trap accesses and implement all features in software. For systems that need high-performance timers and counters but are not concerned with obfuscating the underlying hardware counters, the counters can be directly exposed to lower privilege modes.
The cycle, instret, and hpmcountern CSRs are
read-only shadows of mcycle, minstret, and mhpmcounter n, respectively. The time CSR is a read-only shadow of the
memory-mapped mtime register. Analogously, on RV32I the cycleh,
instreth and hpmcounternh CSRs are read-only shadows of
mcycleh, minstreth and mhpmcounternh, respectively.
On RV32I the timeh CSR is a read-only shadow of the upper 32 bits of
the memory-mapped mtime register, while time shadows only the
lower 32 bits of mtime.
Implementations can convert reads of the time and timeh CSRs
into loads to the memory-mapped mtime register, or emulate this
functionality in M-mode software.
In systems with U-mode, the mcounteren must be implemented, but all
fields are WARL and may be read-only zero,
indicating reads to the corresponding counter will
cause an illegal instruction exception when executing in a less-privileged mode.
In systems without U-mode, the mcounteren register should not exist.
3.1.12 Machine Counter-Inhibit CSR (mcountinhibit)
mcountinhibit.The counter-inhibit register mcountinhibit is a 32-bit WARL register
that controls which of the hardware performance-monitoring counters increment.
The settings in this register only control whether the counters increment;
their accessibility is not affected by the setting of this register.
When the CY, IR, or HPMn bit in the mcountinhibit register is
clear, the cycle, instret, or hpmcountern register
increments as usual. When the CY, IR, or HPMn bit is set, the
corresponding counter does not increment.
The mcycle CSR may be shared between harts on the same core, in which
case the mcountinhibit.CY field is also shared between those harts,
and so writes to mcountinhibit.CY will be visible to those harts.
If the mcountinhibit register is not implemented, the implementation
behaves as though the register were set to zero.
When the cycle and instret counters are not needed, it is
desirable to conditionally inhibit them to reduce energy consumption.
Providing a single CSR to inhibit all counters also allows the counters to be
atomically sampled.
Because the time counter can be shared between multiple cores, it
cannot be inhibited with the mcountinhibit mechanism.
3.1.13 Machine Scratch Register (mscratch)
The mscratch register is an MXLEN-bit read/write register
dedicated for use by machine mode. Typically, it is used to hold a
pointer to a machine-mode hart-local context space and swapped with a
user register upon entry to an M-mode trap handler.
The MIPS ISA allocated two user registers (k0/k1) for use
by the operating system. Although the MIPS scheme provides a fast and
simple implementation, it also reduces available user registers, and
does not scale to further privilege levels, or nested traps. It can
also require both registers are cleared before returning to user level
to avoid a potential security hole and to provide deterministic
debugging behavior.
The RISC-V user ISA was designed to support many possible privileged
system environments and so we did not want to infect the user-level
ISA with any OS-dependent features. The RISC-V CSR swap instructions
can quickly save/restore values to the mscratch register.
Unlike the MIPS design, the OS can rely on holding a value in the mscratch register while the user context is running.
3.1.14 Machine Exception Program Counter (mepc)
mepc is an MXLEN-bit read/write register formatted as shown in
Figure 1.20. The low bit of mepc (mepc[0]) is
always zero. On implementations that support only IALIGN=32, the two low bits
(mepc[1:0]) are always zero.
If an implementation allows IALIGN to be either 16 or 32 (by
changing CSR misa, for example), then, whenever IALIGN=32, bit
mepc[1] is masked on reads so that it appears to be 0. This
masking occurs also for the implicit read by the MRET instruction.
Though masked, mepc[1] remains writable when IALIGN=32.
mepc is a WARL register that must be able to hold all valid
virtual addresses. It need not be capable of holding all possible invalid
addresses.
Prior to writing mepc, implementations may convert an invalid address
into some other invalid address that mepc is capable of holding.
When address translation is not in effect, virtual addresses and physical
addresses are equal.
Hence, the set of addresses mepc must be able to represent includes the
set of physical addresses that can be used as a valid pc or effective
address.
When a trap is taken into M-mode, mepc is written with the
virtual address of the instruction that was interrupted or that
encountered the exception. Otherwise, mepc is never written by
the implementation, though it may be explicitly written by software.
3.1.15 Machine Cause Register (mcause)
The mcause register is an MXLEN-bit read-write register formatted as
shown in Figure 1.21. When a trap is taken into M-mode, mcause is written with a code indicating the event that caused the trap.
Otherwise, mcause is never written by the implementation, though it may be
explicitly written by software.
The Interrupt bit in the mcause register is set if the
trap was caused by an interrupt. The Exception Code field
contains a code identifying the last exception or interrupt. Table [mcauses]
lists the possible machine-level exception codes. The Exception Code
is a WLRL field, so is only guaranteed to hold supported exception
codes.
mcause.| Interrupt | Exception Code | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | Reserved | |
| 1 | 1 | Supervisor software interrupt | |
| 1 | 2 | Reserved | |
| 1 | 3 | Machine software interrupt | |
| 1 | 4 | Reserved | |
| 1 | 5 | Supervisor timer interrupt | |
| 1 | 6 | Reserved | |
| 1 | 7 | Machine timer interrupt | |
| 1 | 8 | Reserved | |
| 1 | 9 | Supervisor external interrupt | |
| 1 | 10 | Reserved | |
| 1 | 11 | Machine external interrupt | |
| 1 | 12–15 | Reserved | |
| 1 | ≥16 | Designated for platform use | |
| 0 | 0 | Instruction address misaligned | |
| 0 | 1 | Instruction access fault | |
| 0 | 2 | Illegal instruction | |
| 0 | 3 | Breakpoint | |
| 0 | 4 | Load address misaligned | |
| 0 | 5 | Load access fault | |
| 0 | 6 | Store/AMO address misaligned | |
| 0 | 7 | Store/AMO access fault | |
| 0 | 8 | Environment call from U-mode | |
| 0 | 9 | Environment call from S-mode | |
| 0 | 10 | Reserved | |
| 0 | 11 | Environment call from M-mode | |
| 0 | 12 | Instruction page fault | |
| 0 | 13 | Load page fault | |
| 0 | 14 | Reserved | |
| 0 | 15 | Store/AMO page fault | |
| 0 | 16–23 | Reserved | |
| 0 | 24–31 | Designated for custom use | |
| 0 | 32–47 | Reserved | |
| 0 | 48–63 | Designated for custom use | |
| 0 | ≥64 | Reserved |
Note that load and load-reserved instructions generate load exceptions, whereas store, store-conditional, and AMO instructions generate store/AMO exceptions.
Interrupts can be separated from other traps with a single branch on the sign of
the mcause register value. A shift left can remove the
interrupt bit and scale the exception codes to index into a trap
vector table.
We do not distinguish privileged instruction exceptions from illegal opcode exceptions. This simplifies the architecture and also hides details of which higher-privilege instructions are supported by an implementation. The privilege level servicing the trap can implement a policy on whether these need to be distinguished, and if so, whether a given opcode should be treated as illegal or privileged.
If an instruction may raise multiple synchronous exceptions, the
decreasing priority order of Table [exception-priority]
indicates which exception is taken and reported in mcause.
The priority of any custom synchronous exceptions is implementation-defined.
| Priority | Exc.Code | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Highest | 3 | Instruction address breakpoint |
| During instruction address translation: | ||
| 12, 1 | First encountered page fault or access fault | |
| With physical address for instruction: | ||
| 1 | Instruction access fault | |
| 2 | Illegal instruction | |
| 0 | Instruction address misaligned | |
| 8, 9, 11 | Environment call | |
| 3 | Environment break | |
| 3 | Load/store/AMO address breakpoint | |
| Optionally: | ||
| 4, 6 | Load/store/AMO address misaligned | |
| During address translation for an explicit memory access: | ||
| 13, 15, 5, 7 | First encountered page fault or access fault | |
| With physical address for an explicit memory access: | ||
| 5, 7 | Load/store/AMO access fault | |
| If not higher priority: | ||
| Lowest | 4, 6 | Load/store/AMO address misaligned |
When a virtual address is translated into a physical address, the address translation algorithm determines what specific exception may be raised.
Load/store/AMO address-misaligned exceptions may have either higher or lower priority than load/store/AMO page-fault and access-fault exceptions.
The relative priority of load/store/AMO address-misaligned and page-fault exceptions is implementation-defined to flexibly cater to two design points. Implementations that never support misaligned accesses can unconditionally raise the misaligned-address exception without performing address translation or protection checks. Implementations that support misaligned accesses only to some physical addresses must translate and check the address before determining whether the misaligned access may proceed, in which case raising the page-fault exception or access is more appropriate.
Instruction address breakpoints have the same cause value as, but different priority than, data address breakpoints (a.k.a. watchpoints) and environment break exceptions (which are raised by the EBREAK instruction).
Instruction address misaligned exceptions are raised by control-flow instructions with misaligned targets, rather than by the act of fetching an instruction. Therefore, these exceptions have lower priority than other instruction address exceptions.
3.1.16 Machine Trap Value Register (mtval)
The mtval register is an MXLEN-bit read-write register formatted as shown
in Figure 1.22. When a trap is taken into M-mode, mtval is
either set to zero or written with exception-specific information to assist
software in handling the trap. Otherwise, mtval is never written by the
implementation, though it may be explicitly written by software. The hardware
platform will specify which exceptions must set mtval informatively and
which may unconditionally set it to zero.
If the hardware platform specifies that no exceptions set mtval to a
nonzero value, then mtval is read-only zero.
If mtval is written with a nonzero value when a breakpoint,
address-misaligned, access-fault, or page-fault exception occurs on an
instruction fetch, load, or store, then mtval will contain the faulting
virtual address.
When page-based virtual memory is enabled, mtval is written with
the faulting virtual address, even for physical-memory access-fault exceptions.
This design reduces datapath cost for most implementations, particularly
those with hardware page-table walkers.
If mtval is written with a nonzero value when a misaligned load or store
causes an access-fault or page-fault exception, then mtval will contain
the virtual address of the portion of the access that caused the fault.
If mtval is written with a nonzero value when an instruction
access-fault or page-fault exception occurs on a system with variable-length
instructions, then mtval will contain the virtual address of the portion
of the instruction that caused the fault, while mepc will point to the
beginning of the instruction.
The mtval register can optionally also be used to return the faulting
instruction bits on an illegal instruction exception (mepc points to the
faulting instruction in memory).
If mtval is written with a nonzero value when an illegal-instruction
exception occurs, then mtval will contain the shortest of:
the actual faulting instruction
the first ILEN bits of the faulting instruction
the first MXLEN bits of the faulting instruction
The value loaded into mtval on an illegal-instruction exception is
right-justified and all unused upper bits are cleared to zero.
Capturing the faulting instruction in mtval reduces the
overhead of instruction emulation, potentially avoiding several
partial instruction loads if the instruction is misaligned, and
likely data cache misses or slow uncached accesses when loads are
used to fetch the instruction into a data register. There is also a
problem of atomicity if another agent is manipulating the
instruction memory, as might occur in a dynamic translation system.
A requirement is that the entire instruction (or at least the first
MXLEN bits) are fetched into mtval before taking the trap.
This should not constrain implementations, which would typically
fetch the entire instruction before attempting to decode the
instruction, and avoids complicating software handlers.
A value of zero in mtval signifies either that the feature is
not supported, or an illegal zero instruction was fetched. A load
from the instruction memory pointed to by mepc can be used to
distinguish these two cases (or alternatively, the system
configuration information can be interrogated to install the
appropriate trap handling before runtime).
For other traps, mtval is set to zero, but a future standard may
redefine mtval’s setting for other traps.
If mtval is not read-only zero, it is a WARL register that must be
able to hold all valid virtual addresses and the value zero.
It need not be capable of holding all
possible invalid addresses.
Prior to writing mtval, implementations may convert an invalid address
into some other invalid address that mtval is capable of holding.
If the feature to return the faulting instruction bits is implemented, mtval must also be able to hold all values less than 2N, where N is the
smaller of MXLEN and ILEN.
3.1.17 Machine Configuration Pointer Register (mconfigptr)
mconfigptr is an MXLEN-bit read-only CSR, formatted as shown in
Figure 1.23, that holds the physical address of a configuration
data structure.
Software can traverse this data structure to discover information about
the harts, the platform, and their configuration.
The pointer alignment in bits must be no smaller than the greatest supported
MXLEN: i.e., if the greatest supported MXLEN is 8 × n, then
mconfigptr[log2n-1:0] must be zero.
mconfigptr must be implemented, but it may be zero to
indicate the configuration data structure does not exist or that an
alternative mechanism must be used to locate it.
The format and schema of the configuration data structure have yet to be standardized.
While mconfigptr will simply be hardwired in some implementations, other
implementations may provide a means to configure the value returned on CSR
reads.
For example, mconfigptr might present the value of a memory-mapped
register that is programmed by the platform or by M-mode software towards the
beginning of the boot process.
3.1.18
Machine Environment Configuration Registers
(menvcfg and menvcfgh)
The menvcfg CSR is an MXLEN-bit read/write register,
formatted for MXLEN=64 as shown in Figure 1.24,
that controls certain characteristics of the execution environment
for modes less privileged than M.
menvcfg) for MXLEN=64.If bit FIOM (Fence of I/O implies Memory) is set to one in menvcfg,
FENCE instructions executed in modes less privileged than M are modified so
the requirement to order accesses to device I/O implies also the requirement
to order main memory accesses.
Table [tab:menvcfg-FIOM] details the modified interpretation of
FENCE instruction bits PI, PO, SI, and SO for modes less privileged than M
when FIOM=1.
Similarly, for modes less privileged than M when FIOM=1, if an atomic instruction that accesses a region ordered as device I/O has its aq and/or rl bit set, then that instruction is ordered as though it accesses both device I/O and memory.
If S-mode is not supported, or if satp.MODE is read-only zero
(always Bare), the implementation may make FIOM read-only zero.
| Instruction bit | Meaning when set |
|---|---|
| PI | Predecessor device input and memory reads (PR implied) |
| PO | Predecessor device output and memory writes (PW implied) |
| SI | Successor device input and memory reads (SR implied) |
| SO | Successor device output and memory writes (SW implied) |
Bit FIOM is needed in menvcfg so M-mode can emulate the
hypervisor extension of Chapter [hypervisor], which has an
equivalent FIOM bit in the hypervisor CSR henvcfg.
The PBMTE bit controls whether the Svpbmt extension is available for use in
S-mode and G-stage address translation (i.e., for page tables pointed to by
satp or hgatp).
When PBMTE=1, Svpbmt is available for S-mode and G-stage address translation.
When PBMTE=0, the implementation behaves as though Svpbmt were not implemented.
If Svpbmt is not implemented, PBMTE is read-only zero.
Furthermore, for implementations with the hypervisor extension,
henvcfg.PBMTE is read-only zero if menvcfg.PBMTE is zero.
The definition of the STCE field will be furnished by the
forthcoming Sstc extension.
Its allocation within menvcfg may change prior to the ratification
of that extension.
The definition of the CBZE field will be furnished by the
forthcoming Zicboz extension.
Its allocation within menvcfg may change prior to the ratification
of that extension.
The definitions of the CBCFE and CBIE fields will be furnished by the
forthcoming Zicbom extension.
Their allocations within menvcfg may change prior to the ratification
of that extension.
When MXLEN=32, menvcfg contains the same fields as bits 31:0
of menvcfg when MXLEN=64.
Additionally, when MXLEN=32, menvcfgh is a 32-bit read/write register that
contains the same fields as bits 63:32 of menvcfg when
MXLEN=64.
Register menvcfgh does not exist when MXLEN=64.
If U-mode is not supported, then registers menvcfg and menvcfgh do
not exist.
3.1.19 Machine Security Configuration Register (mseccfg)
mseccfg is an optional MXLEN-bit read/write register, formatted as shown
in Figure 1.25, that controls security features.
When MXLEN=32 only, mseccfgh is a 32-bit read/write register that
contains the same fields as mseccfg bits 63:32 when MXLEN=64.
mseccfg).The definitions of the SSEED and USEED fields will be furnished by the
forthcoming entropy-source extension, Zkr.
Their allocations within mseccfg may change prior to the ratification
of that extension.
The definitions of the RLB, MMWP, and MML fields will be furnished by the
forthcoming PMP-enhancement extension, Smepmp.
Their allocations within mseccfg may change prior to the ratification
of that extension.
3.2 Machine-Level Memory-Mapped Registers
3.2.1 Machine Timer Registers (mtime and mtimecmp)
Platforms provide a real-time counter, exposed as a memory-mapped
machine-mode read-write register, mtime. mtime must
increment at constant frequency, and the platform must provide a
mechanism for determining the period of an mtime tick. The mtime register will wrap around if the count overflows.
The mtime register has a 64-bit precision on all RV32 and RV64
systems. Platforms provide a 64-bit memory-mapped machine-mode
timer compare register (mtimecmp).
A machine timer interrupt becomes pending whenever mtime contains
a value greater than or equal to mtimecmp, treating the values
as unsigned integers.
The interrupt remains posted until mtimecmp becomes greater than
mtime (typically as a result of writing mtimecmp).
The interrupt will only be taken if interrupts
are enabled and the MTIE bit is set in the mie register.
The timer facility is defined to use wall-clock time rather than a cycle counter to support modern processors that run with a highly variable clock frequency to save energy through dynamic voltage and frequency scaling.
Accurate real-time clocks (RTCs) are relatively expensive to provide
(requiring a crystal or MEMS oscillator) and have to run even when the
rest of system is powered down, and so there is usually only one in a
system located in a different frequency/voltage domain from the
processors. Hence, the RTC must be shared by all the harts in a
system and accesses to the RTC will potentially incur the penalty of a
voltage-level-shifter and clock-domain crossing. It is thus more
natural to expose mtime as a memory-mapped register than as a CSR.
Lower privilege levels do not have their own timecmp registers.
Instead, machine-mode software can implement any number of virtual timers on
a hart by multiplexing the next timer interrupt into the mtimecmp
register.
Simple fixed-frequency systems can use a single clock for both cycle counting and wall-clock time.
Writes to mtime and mtimecmp are guaranteed to be reflected in
MTIP eventually, but not necessarily immediately.
A spurious timer interrupt might occur if an interrupt handler increments mtimecmp then immediately returns, because MTIP might not yet have fallen in
the interim. All software should be written to assume this event is possible,
but most software should assume this event is extremely unlikely. It is
almost always more performant to incur an occasional spurious timer interrupt
than to poll MTIP until it falls.
In RV32, memory-mapped writes to mtimecmp modify only one 32-bit
part of the register. The following code sequence sets a 64-bit mtimecmp value without spuriously generating a timer interrupt due
to the intermediate value of the comparand:
mtimecmp
prevents mtimecmp from temporarily becoming smaller than the lesser
of the old and new values.For RV64, naturally aligned 64-bit memory accesses to the mtime and mtimecmp registers are additionally supported and are atomic.
3.3 Machine-Mode Privileged Instructions
3.3.1 Environment Call and Breakpoint
The ECALL instruction is used to make a request to the supporting execution environment. When executed in U-mode, S-mode, or M-mode, it generates an environment-call-from-U-mode exception, environment-call-from-S-mode exception, or environment-call-from-M-mode exception, respectively, and performs no other operation.
ECALL generates a different exception for each originating privilege mode so that environment call exceptions can be selectively delegated. A typical use case for Unix-like operating systems is to delegate to S-mode the environment-call-from-U-mode exception but not the others.
The EBREAK instruction is used by debuggers to cause control to be transferred back to a debugging environment. It generates a breakpoint exception and performs no other operation.
As described in the “C” Standard Extension for Compressed Instructions in Volume I of this manual, the C.EBREAK instruction performs the same operation as the EBREAK instruction.
ECALL and EBREAK cause the receiving privilege mode’s epc register
to be set to the address of the ECALL or EBREAK instruction itself, not
the address of the following instruction.
As ECALL and EBREAK cause synchronous exceptions, they are not considered to
retire, and should not increment the minstret CSR.
3.3.2 Trap-Return Instructions
Instructions to return from trap are encoded under the PRIV minor opcode.
To return after handling a trap, there are separate trap return
instructions per privilege level, MRET and SRET. MRET is
always provided. SRET must be provided if supervisor mode is
supported, and should raise an illegal instruction exception otherwise. SRET
should also raise an illegal instruction exception when TSR=1 in mstatus,
as described in Section 1.1.6.5.
An xRET instruction can be executed in privilege mode x
or higher, where executing a lower-privilege xRET instruction
will pop the relevant lower-privilege interrupt enable and privilege
mode stack. In addition to manipulating the privilege stack as
described in Section 1.1.6.1, xRET sets the pc
to the value stored in the xepc register.
If the A extension is supported, the xRET instruction is allowed to clear any outstanding LR address reservation but is not required to. Trap handlers should explicitly clear the reservation if required (e.g., by using a dummy SC) before executing the xRET.
If xRET instructions always cleared LR reservations, it would be impossible to single-step through LR/SC sequences using a debugger.
3.3.3 Wait for Interrupt
The Wait for Interrupt instruction (WFI) provides a hint to the
implementation that the current hart can be stalled until an interrupt
might need servicing. Execution of the WFI instruction can also be
used to inform the hardware platform that suitable interrupts should
preferentially be routed to this hart. WFI is available in all
privileged modes, and optionally available to U-mode. This instruction may
raise an illegal instruction exception when TW=1 in mstatus, as described
in Section 1.1.6.5.
If an enabled interrupt is present or later becomes present while the
hart is stalled, the interrupt trap will be taken on the
following instruction, i.e., execution resumes in the trap handler and
mepc = pc + 4.
The following instruction takes the interrupt trap so that a simple return from the trap handler will execute code after the WFI instruction.
The purpose of the WFI instruction is to provide a hint to the implementation, and so a legal implementation is to simply implement WFI as a NOP.
If the implementation does not stall the hart on execution of the instruction, then the interrupt will be taken on some instruction in the idle loop containing the WFI, and on a simple return from the handler, the idle loop will resume execution.
The WFI instruction can also be executed when interrupts are disabled. The
operation of WFI must be unaffected by the global interrupt bits in mstatus (MIE and SIE) and the delegation register mideleg
(i.e., the hart must resume if a locally enabled interrupt becomes pending,
even if it has been delegated to a less-privileged mode), but should honor the
individual interrupt enables (e.g, MTIE) (i.e., implementations should
avoid resuming the hart if the interrupt is pending but not
individually enabled). WFI is also required to resume execution for
locally enabled interrupts pending at any privilege level, regardless
of the global interrupt enable at each privilege level.
If the event that causes the hart to resume execution does not cause
an interrupt to be taken, execution will resume at pc + 4, and
software must determine what action to take, including looping back to
repeat the WFI if there was no actionable event.
By allowing wakeup when interrupts are disabled, an alternate entry point to an interrupt handler can be called that does not require saving the current context, as the current context can be saved or discarded before the WFI is executed.
As implementations are free to implement WFI as a NOP, software must
explicitly check for any relevant pending but disabled interrupts in
the code following an WFI, and should loop back to the WFI if no
suitable interrupt was detected. The mip or sip
registers can be interrogated to determine the presence
of any interrupt in machine or supervisor mode
respectively.
The operation of WFI is unaffected by the delegation register settings.
WFI is defined so that an implementation can trap into a higher privilege mode, either immediately on encountering the WFI or after some interval to initiate a machine-mode transition to a lower power state, for example.
The same “wait-for-event” template might be used for possible future extensions that wait on memory locations changing, or message arrival.
3.3.4 Custom SYSTEM Instructions
The subspace of the SYSTEM major opcode shown in Figure 1.27 is designated for custom use. It is recommended that these instructions use bits 29:28 to designate the minimum required privilege mode, as do other SYSTEM instructions.
3.4 Reset
Upon reset, a hart’s privilege mode is set to M. The mstatus fields MIE
and MPRV are reset to 0.
If little-endian memory accesses are supported, the mstatus/mstatush
field MBE is reset to 0.
The misa register is reset to enable the maximal set of supported
extensions and widest MXLEN, as described in Section 1.1.1.
For implementations with the “A” standard extension, there is no valid load
reservation.
The pc is set to an implementation-defined
reset vector. The mcause register is set to a value indicating the
cause of the reset.
Writable PMP registers’ A and L fields are set to 0, unless the platform
mandates a different reset value for some PMP registers’ A and L fields.
If the hypervisor extension is implemented, the hgatp.MODE and
vsatp.MODE fields are reset to 0.
No WARL field contains an illegal value.
All other hart state is .
The mcause values after reset have implementation-specific
interpretation, but the value 0 should be returned on implementations
that do not distinguish different reset conditions. Implementations
that distinguish different reset conditions should only use 0 to
indicate the most complete reset.
Some designs may have multiple causes of reset (e.g., power-on reset, external hard reset, brownout detected, watchdog timer elapse, sleep-mode wakeup), which machine-mode software and debuggers may wish to distinguish.
mcause reset values may alias mcause values following synchronous
exceptions. There should be no ambiguity in this overlap, since on reset the
pc is typically set to a different value than on other traps.
3.5 Non-Maskable Interrupts
Non-maskable interrupts (NMIs) are only used for hardware error
conditions, and cause an immediate jump to an implementation-defined
NMI vector running in M-mode regardless of the state of a hart’s
interrupt enable bits. The mepc register is written with the
virtual address of the instruction that was interrupted,
and mcause is set to a value indicating the source of the
NMI. The NMI can thus overwrite state in an active machine-mode
interrupt handler.
The values written to mcause on an NMI are
implementation-defined. The high Interrupt bit of mcause should
be set to indicate that this was an interrupt. An Exception Code of 0
is reserved to mean “unknown cause” and implementations that do not
distinguish sources of NMIs via the mcause register should
return 0 in the Exception Code.
Unlike resets, NMIs do not reset processor state, enabling diagnosis, reporting, and possible containment of the hardware error.
3.6 Physical Memory Attributes
The physical memory map for a complete system includes various address ranges, some corresponding to memory regions, some to memory-mapped control registers, and some to vacant holes in the address space. Some memory regions might not support reads, writes, or execution; some might not support subword or subblock accesses; some might not support atomic operations; and some might not support cache coherence or might have different memory models. Similarly, memory-mapped control registers vary in their supported access widths, support for atomic operations, and whether read and write accesses have associated side effects. In RISC-V systems, these properties and capabilities of each region of the machine’s physical address space are termed physical memory attributes (PMAs). This section describes RISC-V PMA terminology and how RISC-V systems implement and check PMAs.
PMAs are inherent properties of the underlying hardware and rarely change during system operation. Unlike physical memory protection values described in Section 1.7, PMAs do not vary by execution context. The PMAs of some memory regions are fixed at chip design time—for example, for an on-chip ROM. Others are fixed at board design time, depending, for example, on which other chips are connected to off-chip buses. Off-chip buses might also support devices that could be changed on every power cycle (cold pluggable) or dynamically while the system is running (hot pluggable). Some devices might be configurable at run time to support different uses that imply different PMAs—for example, an on-chip scratchpad RAM might be cached privately by one core in one end-application, or accessed as a shared non-cached memory in another end-application.
Most systems will require that at least some PMAs are dynamically checked in hardware later in the execution pipeline after the physical address is known, as some operations will not be supported at all physical memory addresses, and some operations require knowing the current setting of a configurable PMA attribute. While many other architectures specify some PMAs in the virtual memory page tables and use the TLB to inform the pipeline of these properties, this approach injects platform-specific information into a virtualized layer and can cause system errors unless attributes are correctly initialized in each page-table entry for each physical memory region. In addition, the available page sizes might not be optimal for specifying attributes in the physical memory space, leading to address-space fragmentation and inefficient use of expensive TLB entries.
For RISC-V, we separate out specification and checking of PMAs into a separate hardware structure, the PMA checker. In many cases, the attributes are known at system design time for each physical address region, and can be hardwired into the PMA checker. Where the attributes are run-time configurable, platform-specific memory-mapped control registers can be provided to specify these attributes at a granularity appropriate to each region on the platform (e.g., for an on-chip SRAM that can be flexibly divided between cacheable and uncacheable uses). PMAs are checked for any access to physical memory, including accesses that have undergone virtual to physical memory translation. To aid in system debugging, we strongly recommend that, where possible, RISC-V processors precisely trap physical memory accesses that fail PMA checks. Precisely trapped PMA violations manifest as instruction, load, or store access-fault exceptions, distinct from virtual-memory page-fault exceptions. Precise PMA traps might not always be possible, for example, when probing a legacy bus architecture that uses access failures as part of the discovery mechanism. In this case, error responses from slave devices will be reported as imprecise bus-error interrupts.
PMAs must also be readable by software to correctly access certain devices or to correctly configure other hardware components that access memory, such as DMA engines. As PMAs are tightly tied to a given physical platform’s organization, many details are inherently platform-specific, as is the means by which software can learn the PMA values for a platform. Some devices, particularly legacy buses, do not support discovery of PMAs and so will give error responses or time out if an unsupported access is attempted. Typically, platform-specific machine-mode code will extract PMAs and ultimately present this information to higher-level less-privileged software using some standard representation.
Where platforms support dynamic reconfiguration of PMAs, an interface will be provided to set the attributes by passing requests to a machine-mode driver that can correctly reconfigure the platform. For example, switching cacheability attributes on some memory regions might involve platform-specific operations, such as cache flushes, that are available only to machine-mode.
3.6.1 Main Memory versus I/O versus Vacant Regions
The most important characterization of a given memory address range is whether it holds regular main memory, or I/O devices, or is vacant. Regular main memory is required to have a number of properties, specified below, whereas I/O devices can have a much broader range of attributes. Memory regions that do not fit into regular main memory, for example, device scratchpad RAMs, are categorized as I/O regions. Vacant regions are also classified as I/O regions but with attributes specifying that no accesses are supported.
3.6.2 Supported Access Type PMAs
Access types specify which access widths, from 8-bit byte to long multi-word burst, are supported, and also whether misaligned accesses are supported for each access width.
Although software running on a RISC-V hart cannot directly generate bursts to memory, software might have to program DMA engines to access I/O devices and might therefore need to know which access sizes are supported.
Main memory regions always support read and write of all access widths required by the attached devices, and can specify whether instruction fetch is supported.
Some platforms might mandate that all of main memory support instruction fetch. Other platforms might prohibit instruction fetch from some main memory regions.
In some cases, the design of a processor or device accessing main memory might support other widths, but must be able to function with the types supported by the main memory.
I/O regions can specify which combinations of read, write, or execute accesses to which data widths are supported.
For systems with page-based virtual memory, I/O and memory regions can specify which combinations of hardware page-table reads and hardware page-table writes are supported.
Unix-like operating systems generally require that all of cacheable main memory supports page-table walks.
3.6.3 Atomicity PMAs
Atomicity PMAs describes which atomic instructions are supported in this address region. Support for atomic instructions is divided into two categories: LR/SC and AMOs.
Some platforms might mandate that all of cacheable main memory support all atomic operations required by the attached processors.
3.6.3.1 AMO PMA
Within AMOs, there are four levels of
support: AMONone, AMOSwap, AMOLogical, and
AMOArithmetic. AMONone indicates that no AMO operations are
supported. AMOSwap indicates that only amoswap instructions are
supported in this address range. AMOLogical indicates that swap
instructions plus all the logical AMOs (amoand, amoor,
amoxor) are supported. AMOArithmetic indicates that all RISC-V
AMOs are supported. For each level of support, naturally aligned AMOs
of a given width are supported if the underlying memory region
supports reads and writes of that width.
Main memory and I/O regions may only support a subset or none of the
processor-supported atomic operations.
| AMO Class | Supported Operations |
|---|---|
| AMONone | None |
| AMOSwap | amoswap |
| AMOLogical | above + amoand, amoor, amoxor |
| AMOArithmetic | above + amoadd, amomin, amomax, amominu, amomaxu |
We recommend providing at least AMOLogical support for I/O regions where possible.
3.6.3.2 Reservability PMA
For LR/SC, there are three levels of support indicating combinations of the reservability and eventuality properties: RsrvNone, RsrvNonEventual, and RsrvEventual. RsrvNone indicates that no LR/SC operations are supported (the location is non-reservable). RsrvNonEventual indicates that the operations are supported (the location is reservable), but without the eventual success guarantee described in the unprivileged ISA specification. RsrvEventual indicates that the operations are supported and provide the eventual success guarantee.
We recommend providing RsrvEventual support for main memory regions where possible. Most I/O regions will not support LR/SC accesses, as these are most conveniently built on top of a cache-coherence scheme, but some may support RsrvNonEventual or RsrvEventual.
When LR/SC is used for memory locations marked RsrvNonEventual, software should provide alternative fall-back mechanisms used when lack of progress is detected.
3.6.3.3 Alignment
Memory regions that support aligned LR/SC or aligned AMOs might also support misaligned LR/SC or misaligned AMOs for some addresses and access widths. If, for a given address and access width, a misaligned LR/SC or AMO generates an address-misaligned exception, then all loads, stores, LRs/SCs, and AMOs using that address and access width must generate address-misaligned exceptions.
The standard “A” extension does not support misaligned AMOs or LR/SC pairs. Support for misaligned AMOs is provided by the standard “Zam” extension. Support for misaligned LR/SC sequences is not currently standardized, so LR and SC to misaligned addresses must raise an exception.
Mandating that misaligned loads and stores raise address-misaligned exceptions wherever misaligned AMOs raise address-misaligned exceptions permits the emulation of misaligned AMOs in an M-mode trap handler. The handler guarantees atomicity by acquiring a global mutex and emulating the access within the critical section. Provided that the handler for misaligned loads and stores uses the same mutex, all accesses to a given address that use the same word size will be mutually atomic.
Implementations may raise access-fault exceptions instead of address-misaligned exceptions for some misaligned accesses, indicating the instruction should not be emulated by a trap handler. If, for a given address and access width, all misaligned LRs/SCs and AMOs generate access-fault exceptions, then regular misaligned loads and stores using the same address and access width are not required to execute atomically.
3.6.4 Memory-Ordering PMAs
Regions of the address space are classified as either main memory or I/O for the purposes of ordering by the FENCE instruction and atomic-instruction ordering bits.
Accesses by one hart to main memory regions are observable not only by other harts but also by other devices with the capability to initiate requests in the main memory system (e.g., DMA engines). Coherent main memory regions always have either the RVWMO or RVTSO memory model. Incoherent main memory regions have an implementation-defined memory model.
Accesses by one hart to an I/O region are observable not only by other harts and bus mastering devices but also by targeted slave I/O devices, and I/O regions may be accessed with either relaxed or strong ordering. Accesses to an I/O region with relaxed ordering are generally observed by other harts and bus mastering devices in a manner similar to the ordering of accesses to an RVWMO memory region, as discussed in Section A.4.2 in Volume I of this specification. By contrast, accesses to an I/O region with strong ordering are generally observed by other harts and bus mastering devices in program order.
Each strongly ordered I/O region specifies a numbered ordering channel, which is a mechanism by which ordering guarantees can be provided between different I/O regions. Channel 0 is used to indicate point-to-point strong ordering only, where only accesses by the hart to the single associated I/O region are strongly ordered.
Channel 1 is used to provide global strong ordering across all I/O
regions. Any accesses by a hart to any I/O region associated with
channel 1 can only be observed to have occurred in program order by all
other harts and I/O devices, including relative to accesses made by
that hart to relaxed I/O regions or strongly ordered I/O regions with
different channel numbers. In other words, any access to a region in
channel 1 is equivalent to executing a fence io,io
instruction before and after the instruction.
Other larger channel numbers provide program ordering to accesses by that hart across any regions with the same channel number.
Systems might support dynamic configuration of ordering properties on each memory region.
Strong ordering can be used to improve compatibility with legacy device driver code, or to enable increased performance compared to insertion of explicit ordering instructions when the implementation is known to not reorder accesses.
Local strong ordering (channel 0) is the default form of strong ordering as it is often straightforward to provide if there is only a single in-order communication path between the hart and the I/O device.
Generally, different strongly ordered I/O regions can share the same ordering channel without additional ordering hardware if they share the same interconnect path and the path does not reorder requests.
3.6.5 Coherence and Cacheability PMAs
Coherence is a property defined for a single physical address, and indicates that writes to that address by one agent will eventually be made visible to other agents in the system. Coherence is not to be confused with the memory consistency model of a system, which defines what values a memory read can return given the previous history of reads and writes to the entire memory system. In RISC-V platforms, the use of hardware-incoherent regions is discouraged due to software complexity, performance, and energy impacts.
The cacheability of a memory region should not affect the software view of the region except for differences reflected in other PMAs, such as main memory versus I/O classification, memory ordering, supported accesses and atomic operations, and coherence. For this reason, we treat cacheability as a platform-level setting managed by machine-mode software only.
Where a platform supports configurable cacheability settings for a memory region, a platform-specific machine-mode routine will change the settings and flush caches if necessary, so the system is only incoherent during the transition between cacheability settings. This transitory state should not be visible to lower privilege levels.
We categorize RISC-V caches into three types: master-private, shared, and slave-private. Master-private caches are attached to a single master agent, i.e., one that issues read/write requests to the memory system. Shared caches are located between masters and slaves and may be hierarchically organized. Slave-private caches do not impact coherence, as they are local to a single slave and do not affect other PMAs at a master, so are not considered further here. We use private cache to mean a master-private cache in the following section, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Coherence is straightforward to provide for a shared memory region that is not cached by any agent. The PMA for such a region would simply indicate it should not be cached in a private or shared cache.
Coherence is also straightforward for read-only regions, which can be safely cached by multiple agents without requiring a cache-coherence scheme. The PMA for this region would indicate that it can be cached, but that writes are not supported.
Some read-write regions might only be accessed by a single agent, in which case they can be cached privately by that agent without requiring a coherence scheme. The PMA for such regions would indicate they can be cached. The data can also be cached in a shared cache, as other agents should not access the region.
If an agent can cache a read-write region that is accessible by other agents, whether caching or non-caching, a cache-coherence scheme is required to avoid use of stale values. In regions lacking hardware cache coherence (hardware-incoherent regions), cache coherence can be implemented entirely in software, but software coherence schemes are notoriously difficult to implement correctly and often have severe performance impacts due to the need for conservative software-directed cache-flushing. Hardware cache-coherence schemes require more complex hardware and can impact performance due to the cache-coherence probes, but are otherwise invisible to software.
For each hardware cache-coherent region, the PMA would indicate that the region is coherent and which hardware coherence controller to use if the system has multiple coherence controllers. For some systems, the coherence controller might be an outer-level shared cache, which might itself access further outer-level cache-coherence controllers hierarchically.
Most memory regions within a platform will be coherent to software, because they will be fixed as either uncached, read-only, hardware cache-coherent, or only accessed by one agent.
If a PMA indicates non-cacheability, then accesses to that region must be satisfied by the memory itself, not by any caches.
For implementations with a cacheability-control mechanism, the situation may arise that a program uncacheably accesses a memory location that is currently cache-resident. In this situation, the cached copy must be ignored. This constraint is necessary to prevent more-privileged modes’ speculative cache refills from affecting the behavior of less-privileged modes’ uncacheable accesses.
3.6.6 Idempotency PMAs
Idempotency PMAs describe whether reads and writes to an address region are idempotent. Main memory regions are assumed to be idempotent. For I/O regions, idempotency on reads and writes can be specified separately (e.g., reads are idempotent but writes are not). If accesses are non-idempotent, i.e., there is potentially a side effect on any read or write access, then speculative or redundant accesses must be avoided.
For the purposes of defining the idempotency PMAs, changes in observed memory ordering created by redundant accesses are not considered a side effect.
While hardware should always be designed to avoid speculative or redundant accesses to memory regions marked as non-idempotent, it is also necessary to ensure software or compiler optimizations do not generate spurious accesses to non-idempotent memory regions.
Non-idempotent regions might not support misaligned accesses. Misaligned accesses to such regions should raise access-fault exceptions rather than address-misaligned exceptions, indicating that software should not emulate the misaligned access using multiple smaller accesses, which could cause unexpected side effects.
For non-idempotent regions, implicit reads and writes must not be performed early or speculatively, with the following exceptions. When a non-speculative implicit read is performed, an implementation is permitted to additionally read any of the bytes within a naturally aligned power-of-2 region containing the address of the non-speculative implicit read. Furthermore, when a non-speculative instruction fetch is performed, an implementation is permitted to additionally read any of the bytes within the next naturally aligned power-of-2 region of the same size (with the address of the region taken modulo 2XLEN). The results of these additional reads may be used to satisfy subsequent early or speculative implicit reads. The size of these naturally aligned power-of-2 regions is implementation-defined, but, for systems with page-based virtual memory, must not exceed the smallest supported page size.
3.7 Physical Memory Protection
To support secure processing and contain faults, it is desirable to limit the physical addresses accessible by software running on a hart. An optional physical memory protection (PMP) unit provides per-hart machine-mode control registers to allow physical memory access privileges (read, write, execute) to be specified for each physical memory region. The PMP values are checked in parallel with the PMA checks described in Section 1.6.
The granularity of PMP access control settings are platform-specific, but the standard PMP encoding supports regions as small as four bytes. Certain regions’ privileges can be hardwired—for example, some regions might only ever be visible in machine mode but in no lower-privilege layers.
Platforms vary widely in demands for physical memory protection, and some platforms may provide other PMP structures in addition to or instead of the scheme described in this section.
PMP checks are applied to all accesses whose effective privilege mode is S or
U, including instruction fetches in S and U mode, data accesses in S and
U mode when the MPRV bit in the mstatus register is clear, and data
accesses in any mode when the MPRV bit in mstatus is set and the MPP
field in mstatus contains S or U.
PMP checks are also applied to page-table
accesses for virtual-address translation, for which the effective
privilege mode is S. Optionally, PMP checks may additionally apply
to M-mode accesses, in which case the PMP registers themselves are
locked, so that even M-mode software cannot change them until the hart is
reset. In effect, PMP can grant permissions to S and U
modes, which by default have none, and can revoke permissions
from M-mode, which by default has full permissions.
PMP violations are always trapped precisely at the processor.
3.7.1 Physical Memory Protection CSRs
PMP entries are described by an 8-bit configuration register and one MXLEN-bit address register. Some PMP settings additionally use the address register associated with the preceding PMP entry. Up to 64 PMP entries are supported. Implementations may implement zero, 16, or 64 PMP CSRs; the lowest-numbered PMP CSRs must be implemented first. All PMP CSR fields are WARL and may be read-only zero. PMP CSRs are only accessible to M-mode.
The PMP configuration registers are densely packed into CSRs to minimize
context-switch time.
For RV32, sixteen CSRs, pmpcfg0–pmpcfg15, hold the configurations
pmp0cfg–pmp63cfg for the 64 PMP entries, as shown in
Figure 1.28.
For RV64, eight even-numbered CSRs,
pmpcfg0, pmpcfg2, …, pmpcfg14, hold the configurations
for the 64 PMP entries, as shown in Figure 1.29.
For RV64, the odd-numbered configuration registers,
pmpcfg1, pmpcfg3, …, pmpcfg15, are illegal.
RV64 systems use pmpcfg2, rather than pmpcfg1, to hold
configurations for PMP entries 8–15. This design reduces the cost of
supporting multiple MXLEN values, since the configurations for PMP
entries 8–11 appear in pmpcfg2[31:0] for both RV32 and RV64.
The PMP address registers are CSRs named pmpaddr0–pmpaddr63.
Each PMP address register encodes bits 33–2 of a 34-bit physical address for
RV32, as shown in Figure 1.30. For RV64, each PMP address
register encodes bits 55–2 of a 56-bit physical address, as shown in
Figure 1.31. Not all physical address bits may be implemented,
and so the pmpaddr registers are WARL.
The Sv32 page-based virtual-memory scheme described in Section [sec:sv32] supports 34-bit physical addresses for RV32, so the PMP scheme must support addresses wider than XLEN for RV32. The Sv39 and Sv48 page-based virtual-memory schemes described in Sections [sec:sv39] and [sec:sv48] support a 56-bit physical address space, so the RV64 PMP address registers impose the same limit.
Figure 1.32 shows the layout of a PMP configuration register. The R, W, and X bits, when set, indicate that the PMP entry permits read, write, and instruction execution, respectively. When one of these bits is clear, the corresponding access type is denied. The R, W, and X fields form a collective WARL field for which the combinations with R=0 and W=1 are reserved. The remaining two fields, A and L, are described in the following sections.
Attempting to fetch an instruction from a PMP region that does not have execute permissions raises an instruction access-fault exception. Attempting to execute a load or load-reserved instruction which accesses a physical address within a PMP region without read permissions raises a load access-fault exception. Attempting to execute a store, store-conditional, or AMO instruction which accesses a physical address within a PMP region without write permissions raises a store access-fault exception.
If MXLEN is changed, the contents of the pmpxcfg fields are
preserved, but appear in the pmpcfgy CSR prescribed by the new
setting of MXLEN. For example, when MXLEN is changed from 64 to 32, pmp4cfg moves from pmpcfg0[39:32] to pmpcfg1[7:0]. The pmpaddr CSRs follow the usual CSR width modulation rules described in
Section [sec:csrwidthmodulation].
Address Matching
The A field in a PMP entry’s configuration register encodes the address-matching mode of the associated PMP address register. The encoding of this field is shown in Table [pmpcfg-a]. When A=0, this PMP entry is disabled and matches no addresses. Two other address-matching modes are supported: naturally aligned power-of-2 regions (NAPOT), including the special case of naturally aligned four-byte regions (NA4); and the top boundary of an arbitrary range (TOR). These modes support four-byte granularity.
| A | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | OFF | Null region (disabled) |
| 1 | TOR | Top of range |
| 2 | NA4 | Naturally aligned four-byte region |
| 3 | NAPOT | Naturally aligned power-of-two region, ≥8 bytes |
NAPOT ranges make use of the low-order bits of the associated address register to encode the size of the range, as shown in Table 1.33.
If TOR is selected, the associated address register forms the top of the address range, and the preceding PMP address register forms the bottom of the address range. If PMP entry i’s A field is set to TOR, the entry matches any address y such that ${\tt pmpaddr}_{i-1}\leq y < {\tt pmpaddr}_i$ (irrespective of the value of ${\tt pmpcfg}_{i-1}$). If PMP entry 0’s A field is set to TOR, zero is used for the lower bound, and so it matches any address $y < {\tt pmpaddr}_0$.
If ${\tt pmpaddr}_{i-1}\geq {\tt pmpaddr}_i$ and ${\tt pmpcfg_i.A}$=TOR, then PMP entry i matches no addresses.
Although the PMP mechanism supports regions as small as four bytes, platforms may specify coarser PMP regions. In general, the PMP grain is 2G + 2 bytes and must be the same across all PMP regions. When G ≥ 1, the NA4 mode is not selectable. When G ≥ 2 and ${\tt pmpcfg}_i$.A[1] is set, i.e. the mode is NAPOT, then bits ${\tt pmpaddr}_i$[G-2:0] read as all ones. When G ≥ 1 and ${\tt pmpcfg}_i$.A[1] is clear, i.e. the mode is OFF or TOR, then bits ${\tt pmpaddr}_i$[G-1:0] read as all zeros. Bits ${\tt pmpaddr}_i$[G-1:0] do not affect the TOR address-matching logic. Although changing ${\tt pmpcfg}_i$.A[1] affects the value read from ${\tt pmpaddr}_i$, it does not affect the underlying value stored in that register—in particular, ${\tt pmpaddr}_i$[G-1] retains its original value when ${\tt pmpcfg}_i$.A is changed from NAPOT to TOR/OFF then back to NAPOT.
Software may determine the PMP granularity by writing zero to pmp0cfg,
then writing all ones to pmpaddr0, then reading back pmpaddr0.
If G is the index of the least-significant bit set,
the PMP granularity is 2G + 2 bytes.
If the current XLEN is greater than MXLEN, the PMP address registers are zero-extended from MXLEN to XLEN bits for the purposes of address matching.
Locking and Privilege Mode
The L bit indicates that the PMP entry is locked, i.e., writes to the
configuration register and associated address registers are ignored. Locked
PMP entries remain locked until the hart is reset. If PMP entry i is
locked, writes to pmpicfg and pmpaddri are ignored.
Additionally, if PMP entry i is locked and pmpicfg.A is set
to TOR, writes to pmpaddri-1 are ignored.
Setting the L bit locks the PMP entry even when the A field is set to OFF.
In addition to locking the PMP entry, the L bit indicates whether the R/W/X permissions are enforced on M-mode accesses. When the L bit is set, these permissions are enforced for all privilege modes. When the L bit is clear, any M-mode access matching the PMP entry will succeed; the R/W/X permissions apply only to S and U modes.
Priority and Matching Logic
PMP entries are statically prioritized. The lowest-numbered PMP entry that
matches any byte of an access determines whether that access succeeds or
fails. The matching PMP entry must match all bytes of an access, or the
access fails, irrespective of the L, R, W, and X bits. For example, if a PMP
entry is configured to match the four-byte range 0xC–0xF, then an
8-byte access to the range 0x8–0xF will fail, assuming that
PMP entry is the highest-priority entry that matches those addresses.
If a PMP entry matches all bytes of an access, then the L, R, W, and X bits determine whether the access succeeds or fails. If the L bit is clear and the privilege mode of the access is M, the access succeeds. Otherwise, if the L bit is set or the privilege mode of the access is S or U, then the access succeeds only if the R, W, or X bit corresponding to the access type is set.
If no PMP entry matches an M-mode access, the access succeeds. If no PMP entry matches an S-mode or U-mode access, but at least one PMP entry is implemented, the access fails.
If at least one PMP entry is implemented, but all PMP entries’ A fields are set to OFF, then all S-mode and U-mode memory accesses will fail.
Failed accesses generate an instruction, load, or store access-fault exception. Note that a single instruction may generate multiple accesses, which may not be mutually atomic. An access-fault exception is generated if at least one access generated by an instruction fails, though other accesses generated by that instruction may succeed with visible side effects. Notably, instructions that reference virtual memory are decomposed into multiple accesses.
On some implementations, misaligned loads, stores, and instruction fetches may also be decomposed into multiple accesses, some of which may succeed before an access-fault exception occurs. In particular, a portion of a misaligned store that passes the PMP check may become visible, even if another portion fails the PMP check. The same behavior may manifest for floating-point stores wider than XLEN bits (e.g., the FSD instruction in RV32D), even when the store address is naturally aligned.
3.7.2 Physical Memory Protection and Paging
The Physical Memory Protection mechanism is designed to compose with the page-based virtual memory systems described in Chapter [supervisor]. When paging is enabled, instructions that access virtual memory may result in multiple physical-memory accesses, including implicit references to the page tables. The PMP checks apply to all of these accesses. The effective privilege mode for implicit page-table accesses is S.
Implementations with virtual memory are permitted to perform address
translations speculatively and earlier than required by an explicit memory
access, and are permitted to cache them in address translation cache
structures—including possibly caching the identity mappings from effective
address to physical address used in Bare translation modes and M-mode. The
PMP settings for the resulting physical address may be checked (and possibly
cached) at any point between the address translation and the explicit memory
access.
Hence, when the PMP settings are modified, M-mode software must
synchronize the PMP settings with the virtual memory system and
any PMP or address-translation caches.
This is
accomplished by executing an SFENCE.VMA instruction with rs1=x0
and rs2=x0, after the PMP CSRs are written.
If page-based virtual memory is not implemented, memory accesses check the PMP settings synchronously, so no SFENCE.VMA is needed.
The base width can be quickly ascertained using branches on the sign of the returned
misavalue, and possibly a shift left by one and a second branch on the sign. These checks can be written in assembly code without knowing the register width (XLEN) of the machine. The base width is given by XLEN = 2MXL + 4.The base width can also be found if
misais zero, by placing the immediate 4 in a register then shifting the register left by 31 bits at a time. If zero after one shift, then the machine is RV32. If zero after two shifts, then the machine is RV64, else RV128.