This is required for RISC-V. Privileged spec says:
> For non-leaf PTEs, the D, A, and U bits are reserved for future standard use.
> Until their use is defined by a standard extension, they must be cleared by software
> for forward compatibility.
QEMU fails address translation if it sees any of these flags set on non-leaf page entry.
Currently, this uses a relatively naive method of simply scanning the
512 entries for the PRESENT flag. But, unless the optimizer cannot, it
can be reduced to calculating the bitwise OR of every entry and then
checking that.
If this turns out to be too slow, which it might be when unmapping lots
of pages, then we can (1) either fall back to using a counter like the
old paging code did, or even better (2) use the now-1:1 grants tree to
check if it became empty. Putting the grants code in RMM might be
suboptimal, so instead we can add "unmap_range" and have the kernel
paging code take the offset of the next grant, if any, and then possibly
unmap entire P1s/P2s/P3s -- whatever is in the page tables within that
range.
Note that I am fairly certain that method (1) was the cause of the
visually notorious orbital memory corruption bug.
Andrey Turkin