Re: [PATCH 1/2] VMware detection support for x86 and x86-64

H. Peter Anvin
2008-09-25T22:28:27Z

Zachary Amsden wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 14:59 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>> However, it is the particular use of this for detection use that is
>> utterly damning. Using random I/O port probes for hardware detect
>> should have disappeared in the early 1990's, and it's really disturbing
>> that virtualization vendors -- not just VMWare -- are, in effect,
>> re-making all the mistakes hardware vendors did in the 1980's.
>
> It's not disturbing, it's expected. Re-using old broken solutions happens all the time, they can be perfectly valid in some contexts. The problem is that they tend to live on and evolve into a larger context where they break again. Surely we can do better, but how to do that isn't always clear-cut. DMI is a pretty good standard for this, but it still doesn't solve the problem in all contexts (userspace apps).
>

This, of course, is what CPUID is for.

-hpa