RISC-V double float alignment

[Jiri Gaisler]

On 2/1/19 5:37 PM, Hesham Almatary wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Feb 2019 at 15:08, Jiri Gaisler <jiri at gaisler.se> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> As far as I understand, RISC-V does not require any particular alignment
>> of data structures in memory. Nevertheless, the compiler automatically
>> aligns data structures on their natural sizes, i.e. ints are aligned on
>> 4-byte and doubles on 8-bytes boundaries. sis-riscv with support for
>> doubles (extension D) checks that load and store double are properly
>> aligned on 8-byte boundaries. This works fine for all compiler-generated
>> code, (e.g. paranoia) but fails for spcontext01, where the context save
>> function in riscv-exception-handler.S tries to save 64-bit floating
>> point registers on a non-aligned stack address.
>>
>> Is this an oversight in the code, or does the hardware (and simulators)
>> have to support unaligned accesses?
>>
> Spike can be built to support either aligned or unaligned accesses. This
> includes floating points and integers. It's not in the spec that a RISC-V
> implementation has to support it or not (it's up to the platform),
> but if it doesn't, it should trigger an unaligned access trap and
> should be handled.
>
> That said, I am not sure whether the intention of the RISC-V FPU
> implementation in RTEMS is assuming everything will be aligned
> (in which case some alignment checks should be added) or not.
>
> I had another a look at the RISC-V Context_Control struct. I assume this only
> happens on rv32 with D extension?

Yes, I have just added support for the D extension to sis and I am
testing it against the test suite. It only happens when I compile with
rv32imafd, and saving the FPU context. If I remove the alignment checks
in sis, spcontext01 runs fine. My hardware however does not support
unaligned accesses so I see the error there. The stack pointer is
properly aligned on a 16-byte boundary when the error occurs, so it
seems to be an issue with the layout of the FPU context. I will try to
fix it by modifying the context layout ...

Jiri.