Re: [PATCH] sched/x86: Save [ER]FLAGS on context switch

Peter Zijlstra
2019-02-15T23:34:40Z

On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 06:40:34PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 09:18:00AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 11:34 AM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Something like the below, right?
> > >
> > > + frame->flags = 0;
> > > + frame->flags = 0;
> >
> > Those are not valid flag values.
> >
> > Can you popf them? Yes.
> >
> > Do they make sense? No.
> >
> > It has the IF flag clear, for example. Is that intentional? If it is,
>
> Uhmm. yeah, that's bonkers. We should have interrupts disabled here.
> I'll go read up on the eflags and figure out what they _should_ be right
> about there.

I misread (I'm forever confused about what way around IF goes), but you
said it right; IF=0 is interrupts disabled and we very much have that in
the middle of context switch.

(just for giggles I set IF for the initial flags value; and it comes
unstuck _real_ quick)

Now, EFLAGS bit 1 is supposedly always 1, but it really doesn't seem to
matter for POPF.

I went through the other flags, and aside from VIP/VIF (I've no clue),
they looks like 0 should be just fine.