alt Hacker NewsIn x86 land, there are, as a practical matter, four ISAs: real/v8086 mode, 16-bit protected mode, 32-bit protected mode, and 64-bit “long” mode. Machine code targeting one of these will be executed correctly by the CPU as long as the CPU is in the right mode. (Really it’s messier — there are the CS.D, CS.L, and SS.B bits plus the control bits for v8086, protected and long mode, but this barely matters.)
Sure, this is messy. But, critically, on x86, these are all modes, and any CPU that supports them makes them detectable and supports them in the same way. If you run long mode code outside long mode, some opcodes will be interpreted as the wrong instruction. But you will not find multiple different CPUs that decode valid instructions differently. If I run your weird old x86 code, either it will run correctly or it will fault.
Oh, and all these modes are older than RISC-V. To the extent that there are lessons to be learned, RISC-V should have learned them.
The fact that you can apparently find two RISC-V CPUs that decode some ordinary user mode instructions based on published standards as entirely different operations is bizarre, to say the least. The fact that the relevant CPU features can’t even be enumerated in user mode just makes it worse.
(There are edge cases in x86. Some invalid opcodes have different lengths on different vendors’ CPUs. This is not a problem in practice because, one way or another, they fault. There was also a little glitch in the 64-bit design where some really really old x87 FPU code that uses exceptions cannot be corrected handled by a kernel on a modern CPU.)
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> The fact that the relevant CPU features can’t even be enumerated in user mode just makes it worse.
User-mode feature detection is usually used to select paths for acceleration instructions, like SIMD or crypto. The overlapping RISC-V instructions don't fit in that category: they're compressed versions of basic functions, mostly used in epilogs/prologs, which would be unconditionally compiled in.
There are no overlapping encodings in the 32-bit encoding space and I'm really hoping it stays that way.
> To the extent that there are lessons to be learned, RISC-V should have learned them.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. Also I wish I had been there when Andrew Waterman was writing his master's thesis so I could ask him not to include Whetstone in his size benchmarks, so that we might have left that encoding space free and avoided this conversation :-)
> But you will not find multiple different CPUs that decode valid instructions differently. If I run your weird old x86 code, either it will run correctly or it will fault.
Oh, that's not completely true. Intel 64 and AMD64 are not identical and they certainly have encodings that behave differently. As an example: f3 41 90 is pause on Intel, but xchg r8d, eax on AMD (granted, this is not a canonical instruction encoding). 66 e9 xx xx yy yy is a unconditional jump to a 32-bit relative offset on Intel, but on AMD, the offset is 16-bit only (yy yy are the start of the next instruction). x86-64 is typically used to refer to the very large common subset, but this doesn't mean the implementations behave identically.
There are also some weird corner cases where CPUs aren't 100% backwards compatible, just backwards compatible enough for the software that matters.