FP save/restore code in ppc32/ppc64 kernels

[Peter Bergner]

Paul Mackerras wrote:
: We used to do this (have FE0/1 = 11 for user processes all the time)
: in the 32-bit kernel, but we found we had a situation where random
: processes were occasionally getting spurious SIGFPEs.  What was
: happening was that another process would leave the FPSCR with an
: exception condition enabled and pending.  Then we switched to another
: task which would have MSR.FP=0 and MSR.FE0/1 = 11 and the cpu would
: immediately take a trap (i.e. an interrupt in IBM-speak or an
: exception in Motorola-speak :).
:
: The point is that MSR.FP=0 doesn't disable floating-point exceptions.
: If MSR.FE0/1 != 00 and the FPSCR has both the condition and enable
: bits set for some exception, the cpu will take a trap.  Therefore, if
: the FPSCR doesn't belong to the current process and there is any
: possibility that it could have enabled exception conditions being
: signalled in it, you really want to have FE0/1 = 00.

But isn't the problem of the trap/interrupt/exception leaking into
another process only a problem when we are doing lazy save of the
FP regs?  Since our ppc64 kernels are compiled as SMP, we don't do
lazy save and the giveup_fpu() code would seem to force the pending
FP exceptions to complete before the "mffs" in giveup_fpu finishes.
It might be a good idea to clear the fpscr after saving it out to
the thread struct though...


Peter

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