Reached out to Andrew Waterman. This was his response: "I think the encoding of the privileged modes is a red herring. HS is inherently more privileged than VS, since it controls memory protection and interrupt delegation for VS. Certainly the intent is that HS-mode interrupts are always enabled while executing in VS-mode. Otherwise, badly behaved VS-mode software could starve HS-mode of interrupts."
So my assumption was correct. Jose On Thu, 30 Apr 2020 at 22:47, Jose Martins <josemartin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I'm not sure HS is a higher privilege mode. > > > > HS is privilege encoding 1, which is the same as VS (VU is obviously lower). > > I just checked the spec and it doesn't actually, explicitly state that > HS is a higher-privilege mode than VS. I thought this was something > implicit, but you might be right. I'll try to reach out to the spec > authors to clarify this. > > Jose
