Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 10/24] xen: mask XSAVE from cpuid

H. Peter Anvin
2009-03-15T18:50:26Z

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Jan Beulich wrote:
>> As pointed out on an earlier thread, it seems inappropriate to do probing
>> like this when there is a cpuid feature flag (osxsave) that can be
>> used to
>> determine whether XSAVE can be used. And even without that flag,
>> simply reading CR4 and checking whether osxsave is set there would
>> suffice. This is under the assumption that Xen's to-be-done
>> implementation
>> of XSAVE support would match that of FXSAVE (Xen turns its support on
>> unconditionally and for all [pv] guests).
>
> I didn't want to make too many assumptions about how Xen's XSAVE support
> would look. In particular, I thought it might virtualize the state of
> OSXSAVE to give the guest the honour of appearing to enable it. A guest
> kernel may get confused if it starts with OSXSAVE set, as it may use it
> to control its own init logic.

That wouldn't be an issue if you use the *native* CPUID to look for
OSXSAVE early on, since such virtualization would only be visible though
the PV interface, right?

It seems cleaner than probing, to be sure...

-hpa

--
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.