Re: [PATCH v3 05/19] x86/startup_64: Simplify CR4 handling in startup code

Ard Biesheuvel
2024-02-07T10:38:33Z

On Tue, 6 Feb 2024 at 18:21, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 07:05:08PM +0100, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > From: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
> >
> > When executing in long mode, the CR4.PAE and CR4.LA57 control bits
> > cannot be updated,
>
> "Long mode requires PAE to be enabled in order to use the 64-bit
> page-translation data structures to translate 64-bit virtual addresses
> to 52-bit physical addresses."
>
> which is actually already enabled at that point:
>
> cr4 0x20 [ PAE ]
>
> "5-Level paging is enabled by setting CR4[LA57]=1 when EFER[LMA]=1.
> CR4[LA57] is ignored when long mode is not active (EFER[LMA]=0)."
>
> and if I had a 5-level guest, it would have LA57 already set too.
>
> So I think you mean "When paging is enabled" as dhansen correctly points
> out.
>

Ack.

> > and so they can simply be preserved rather than reason about whether
> > or not they need to be set. CR4.PSE has no effect in long mode so it
> > can be omitted.
>
> f4c5ca985012 ("x86_64: Show CR4.PSE on auxiliaries like on BSP")
>
> Please don't forget about git history before doing changes here.
>

My bad - I misunderstood what is going on here.

> > CR4.PGE is used to flush the TLBs, by clearing it if it was set, and
>
> ... to flush TLB entries with the global bit set.
>
> And just like the above commit says, I think the CR4 settings across all
> CPUs on the machine should be the same. So we want to keep PSE.
>
> Removing the CONFIG_X86_5LEVEL ifdeffery is nice, OTOH.
>

Cheers.