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Is it legal to execute SVC from EL1 in ARMv8?
I have two cores in the same A53, and both are configured the same way with respect to system registers and MMU. When executing SVC #1 from EL1(S), one of the cores correctly generates syndrome 0x56000001 in ESR_EL1 (EC 0b01010101: "SVC instruction execution in AArch64 state"), but the other core generates syndrome 0x02000000 (EC 0b000000: "reason unknown").
I cannot disagree with your conclusion, but both cores are initialized by the same code, though they run in different address spaces.
When I compare the complete set of system registers, the only relevant differences seem to be in SP_ELx, ELR_ELx, TTBR0_ELx, and VBAR_ELx, and that because of the different address spaces.
Perhaps there is some unintended difference, but I'm having a hard time finding anything that looks wrong.
user56000001 said:I cannot disagree with your conclusion, but both cores are initialized by the same code, though they run in different address spaces.
Did you try swap addresses between cores?
Because of your question, I did try swapping addresses, but did not find it to make a difference.
But I do see that in D1.12.4 ("Synchronous exception prioritization for exceptions taken to AArch64 state") of the Armv8-A architecture reference manual, various interrupt types have different priorities. That makes me suspect that something is causing a higher priority exception than my SVC, on every single instruction, and consequently obscuring the ESR_EL1 syndrome.
At present I'm looking disfavorably on the debugger, because I can clear out ESR_EL1, but as soon as I do any stepping, ESR_EL1 immediately goes back to 0x02000000, even though no exception is taken as far as I can tell. I don't know enough about the debugger to know whether that is plausible.