From: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
To: "Lange, Jon" <jlange@microsoft.com>
Cc: "Williams, Dan J" <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>,
Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>,
john.starks@microsoft.com, Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>,
Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>,
"linux-coco@lists.linux.dev" <linux-coco@lists.linux.dev>,
LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
"Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>,
"Edgecombe, Rick P" <rick.p.edgecombe@intel.com>,
Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
Subject: "Paravisor" Feature Enumeration
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2026 13:42:26 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <c4ef08a6-5600-4604-9e40-bd3263a0dcd3@intel.com> (raw)
First,
Jon and John gave a talk in Tokyo about feature enumeration under
paravisors:
> https://lpc.events/event/19/contributions/2188/attachments/1896/4057/05-Paravisor-Integration-with-Confidential-Services.pdf
The tl;dr for me at least was that they'd like a common and consistent
means of enumerating these features in OSes, regardless of the
environment: TDX, SEV-SNP or even ARM CCA.
I wanted to explore one corner of the solution space a bit. There was a
pretty limited audience of folks in the room. Please feel free to flesh
out the cc list with anyone I missed.
Dan Williams' first thought seemed to revolve around having some kind of
platform-independent device that could do the enumeration. Maybe a
synthetic PCI device. I'm sure Dan can chime in to fill in the details
that I missed.
I immediately just thought of CPUID. We already have a whole region of
CPUID (0x40000000) that hypervisors use to enumerate stuff to guests by
convention. It wouldn't be a large leap at all to carve out a chunk of
that so that paravisors can use it.
But the biggest barrier I see there is that our ARM friends don't have
CPUID. It seems like they _mostly_ have bit-by-bit aliases in ACPI or
DeviceTree for the x86 CPUID bits, like:
X86_FEATURE_KVM_CLOCKSOURCE in arm,pvclock
or
X86_FEATURE_KVM_STEAL_TIME in arm,kvm-steal-time
As far as I can tell, these aliases are all done ad-hoc. This approach
could obviously be extended to paravisor features, but it would probably
be on the slow side to do it for each new feature.
It _seems_ like we could pick a chunk of CPUID space (say 32-bits of it)
and alias it 1:1 with some DeviceTree/ACPI property, say
"arm,paravisor-features". Kernel code would just be written to say
"check feature 13" and the arch-specific helpers would either steer that
to CPUID or DeviceTree.
Is there anything like that today that's cross-architecture and
cross-hypervisor? Is there anything stopping us from carving out a chunk
of CPUID for this purpose?
next reply other threads:[~2026-01-05 21:42 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-01-05 21:42 Dave Hansen [this message]
2026-01-06 0:01 ` "Paravisor" Feature Enumeration dan.j.williams
2026-01-06 0:10 ` [EXTERNAL] " Jon Lange
2026-01-06 0:46 ` Dave Hansen
2026-01-06 0:36 ` Dave Hansen
2026-01-06 1:08 ` Sean Christopherson
2026-01-06 3:24 ` dan.j.williams
2026-01-06 1:44 ` Andrew Cooper
2026-01-06 2:12 ` [EXTERNAL] " Jon Lange
2026-01-06 22:39 ` Andrew Cooper
2026-01-06 23:01 ` Jon Lange
2026-01-07 1:58 ` dan.j.williams
2026-01-07 2:48 ` Jon Lange
2026-01-07 18:42 ` dan.j.williams
2026-01-08 6:53 ` Jon Lange
2026-01-07 12:06 ` Kiryl Shutsemau
2026-01-06 19:17 ` Edgecombe, Rick P
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