Re: Standardizing an MSR or other hypercall to get an RNG seed?

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

On 09/18/2014 03:00 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 2:46 PM, David Hepkin <davidhep@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "this mechanism?"  Are you suggesting that each hypervisor put "CrossHVPara\0" somewhere in the 0x40000000 - 0x400fffff CPUID range, and an OS has to do a full scan of this CPUID range on boot to find it?  That seems pretty inefficient.  An OS will take 1000's of hypervisor intercepts on every boot just to search this CPUID range.
> 
> Linux already does this, which is arguably unfortunate.  But it's not
> quite that bad; the KVM and Xen code is only scanning at increments of
> 0x100.
> 
> I think that Linux as a guest would have no problem with checking the
> Hyper-V range or some new range.  I don't think that Linux would want
> to have to set a guest OS identity, and it's not entirely clear to me
> whether this would be necessary to use the Hyper-V mechanism.
> 

We really don't want to have to do this in early code, though.

>>
>> I suggest we come to consensus on a specific CPUID leaf where an OS needs to look to determine if a hypervisor supports this capability.  We could define a new CPUID leaf range at a well-defined location, or we could just use one of the existing CPUID leaf ranges implemented by an existing hypervisor.  I'm not familiar with the KVM CPUID leaf range, but in the case of Hyper-V, the Hyper-V CPUID leaf range was architected to allow for other hypervisors to implement it and just show through specific capabilities supported by the hypervisor.  So, we could define a bit in the Hyper-V CPUID leaf range (since Xen and KVM also implement this range), but that would require Linux to look in that range on boot to discover this capability.
> 
> I also don't know whether QEMU and KVM would be okay with implementing
> the host side of the Hyper-V mechanism by default.  They would have to
> implement at least leaves 0x40000001 and 0x4000002, plus correctly
> reporting zeros through whatever leaf is used for this new feature.
> Gleb?  Paolo?
> 

The problem is what happens with a noncooperating hypervisor.  I guess
we could put a magic number in one of the leaf registers, but still...

	-hpa