ARM SCTLR allows writes to "write ignore" bits Description of problem: The firmware I have executed in qemu sets up pagetables and then enables the MMU. A few instructions later, a prefetch abort was occurring. After debugging it turned out the problem was because get_phys_addr_v5 was being used to walk the pagetable instead of get_phys_addr_v6. qemu has this code: ```c regime_sctlr(env, mmu_idx) & SCTLR_XP // where SCTLR_XP is commented as #define SCTLR_XP (1U << 23) /* up to v6; v7 onward RAO */ ``` Somewhat interestingly, A5 has a lot of bits marked as `/WI`: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0433/c/system-control/register-descriptions/system-control-register A9 has less, but still a few which qemu is not handling: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0388/e/the-system-control-coprocessors/summary-of-system-control-coprocessor-registers/system-control-register I've made this hacky patch to fix it for myself: ```diff diff --git a/qemu/target/arm/helper.c b/qemu/target/arm/helper.c index 60c9db9e..d8fd5a7d 100644 --- a/qemu/target/arm/helper.c +++ b/qemu/target/arm/helper.c @@ -4306,6 +4306,11 @@ static void sctlr_write(CPUARMState *env, const ARMCPRegInfo *ri, { ARMCPU *cpu = env_archcpu(env); + // for cortex-a5 specifically + value |= (0b11 << 22) | (1 << 18) | (1 << 16) | (0b1111 << 3); + value &= ~((1 << 31) | (0b11 << 26) | (1 << 24) | (0b111 << 19) | + (1 << 17) | (0b11 << 14) | (0b111 << 7)); + if (raw_read(env, ri) == value) { /* Skip the TLB flush if nothing actually changed; Linux likes * to do a lot of pointless SCTLR writes. ``` I think the real fix would allow expressing the ones/zeros mask as part of `ARMCPU` per-arch.