Hi Feng,

 

This is standard practice for operating systems, hypervisors, and firmware running on Armv8-A systems. A key distinction between SPSel,#0 and SPSel,#1 is that you can tell which stack pointer you were using when you took an exception as they correspond to different offsets in the vector table. Often times, taking an exception from the same EL when using SPSel,#0 is non-terminal whereas taking an exception from the same EL when already using SPSel,#1 is considered terminal.

 

Take for example the scenario where your operating system, hypervisor, or firmware is running some task/thread code at EL1/EL2/EL3 and runs out of stack space, triggering a translation fault and attempting to stack some data (we’ll probably be using unmapped guard pages at the stack boundaries). The first thing the exception handler will try to do is stack the GPRs. If the reason you took the exception is because the stack pointed to by SP_EL1/2/3 has itself overflowed, this attempt to stack the GPRs will itself cause a translation fault and you’ll get stuck in a recursive exception.

 

In contrast, if the reason you took the exception is because the stack pointed to by SP_EL0 has overflowed, the exception handler will successfully stack the GPRs to the SP_EL1/2/3 stack and be able to diagnose + log what went wrong before rebooting gracefully.

 

Hope that helps,

Ash.