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Ayan Kumar Halder
bd06cf74fc
There can be situations when the registers cannot be emulated to their full functionality. This can be due to the complexity involved. In such cases, one can emulate those registers as RAZ/WI for example. We call them as partial emulation. Some registers are non-optional and as such there is nothing preventing an OS from accessing them. Instead of injecting undefined exception (which might result in crashing a guest), one may want to prefer a partial emulation to let the guest running (in some cases accepting the fact that it might result in unwanted behavior). A suitable example of this (as seen in subsequent patches) is emulation of DBGDTRTX_EL0 (on Arm64) and DBGDTRTXINT(on Arm32). These non-optional registers can be emulated as RAZ/WI and they can be enclosed within CONFIG_PARTIAL_EMULATION. Further, "partial-emulation" command line option allows us to enable/disable partial emulation at run time. While CONFIG_PARTIAL_EMULATION enables support for partial emulation at compile time (i.e. adds code for partial emulation), this option may be enabled or disabled by Yocto or other build systems. However if the build system turns this option on, users can use scripts like Imagebuilder to generate uboot-script which will append "partial-emulation=true" to xen command line to turn on the partial emulation. Thus, it helps to avoid rebuilding xen. By default, "CONFIG_PARTIAL_EMULATION=y" and "partial-emulation=false". This is done so that Xen supports partial emulation. However, customers are fully aware when they enable partial emulation. It's important to note that enabling such support might result in unwanted/non-spec compliant behavior. Added a note in SUPPORT.md to clarify the security support for partial emulation. Signed-off-by: Ayan Kumar Halder <ayan.kumar.halder@amd.com> Signed-off-by: Michal Orzel <michal.orzel@amd.com> Acked-by: Julien Grall <jgrall@amazon.com>