minutes/20210319-V-minutes.txt

Date: 2021/03/19
Task Group: Vector Extension
Chair: Krste Asanovic
Vice-Chair: Roger Espasa
Number of Attendees: ~16
Current issues on github: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec

Issues discussed

#640 Bound on VLMAX/VLEN

Previously, we'd discussed making the upper bound on VLMAX part of
profile, but realization was that bound cannot be later increased in a
software-compatibile way without adding a new instruction, so is
effectively part of the ISA spec.

We discussed having the more general case of VLMAX being the bound,
but consensus was that having bound be a function of VLEN (<=65536)
was simpler to specify and had no great effect on range of supported
systems.

The extension to add independent control of data input size of
vrgather, proposed in #655, was briefly discussed, but this will not
be included in v1.0.

#651 expanding tail-agnostic to allow result values (masks only, or data)

The discussion was around expanding the set of allowable tail-agnostic
values to include the results of the computation.

The consensus was to expand this for mask register writes (except
loads), where only tail-agnostic behavior is required.

But support was not as clear for data register writes, where
tail-undisturbed behavior must be supported and where FP operations
require masking off exception flags even for tail-agnostic.

PoR is to expand mask register writes to allow results to be written
in tail, while continuing discussion on further relaxing for data
register writes.

#457 Ordering in vector AMOs

Current vector AMOs have no facility to order writes to the same
address, whereas indexed stores have an ordered option.

Discussion was on proposal to tie address-based ordering to the wd
(write result data) bit.  One concern was that this seemed to hamper
some cases, including where software wanted the results but knew
addresses were disjoint.  Providing ordering only on same address
would likely require slow implementation on out-of-order machine where
addresses can be produced out of order for different element groups.

Decision was to maintain PoR and consider post-v1.0 ways to support
ordered vector AMOs.