Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH for 4.2] target/arm: generate a custom MIDR for -cpu max

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 at 12:19, Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> While most features are now detected by probing the ID_* registers
> kernels can (and do) use MIDR_EL1 for working out of they have to
> apply errata. This can trip up warnings in the kernel as it tries to
> work out if it should apply workarounds to features that don't
> actually exist in the reported CPU type.
>
> Avoid this problem by synthesising our own MIDR value using the
> reserved value of 0 for the implementer and encoding the moving feast
> that is the QEMU version string into the other fields.

Exposing the QEMU_VERSION_* information to the guest is
usually not a good plan. For instance it means that the
MIDR will mysteriously change if you save a VM on one
version of QEMU and restore it on another. We went through
a while back carefully removing places where we'd exposed
the version number to the guest (have a look at the
qemu_hw_version() stuff which has to jump through hoops
so that old versioned machines like pc-1.5 report the
old "1.5" version number, and any QEMU 2.5 and above
now reports "2.5+"...)

thanks
-- PMM