A New Type of Instruction for Power
summary
Power10 adds double-length prefixed instructions (32-bit prefix + 32-bit suffix) requiring the kernel to stop treating instructions as u32 and instead represent them as a cohesive type; patches explore using a struct ppc_inst or an unsigned long, affecting kprobes, emulation, KVM, module loading and toolchain encodings. Challenges include endian-dependent word order, avoiding prefixed instructions across 64-byte boundaries, page-faults from naive loads, and upstream merge of initial support.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 1:10Prefix Instructions
- 1:58The Power Instruction Set Architecture
- 5:55Prefixed Instructions
- 11:43Pc Relative Addressing
- 16:47Code Patching
- 24:42Derived Types
- 28:49Adding an Instruction Data Type
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