On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 11:17:48AM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> 
> I think it's fine as it is now. :)

On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 09:55:18PM -0400, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:
> 
> W.r.t. monitor/mwait, a guest can do one of the following:
> 
> 1. Never check CPUID, and never use monitor/mwait
>       - This is great, we don't have to do anything about these
> 
> 2. Check CPUID for mwait, use it to idle in preference over hlt
>       - Linux, Windows, and Mavericks (10.9) do this
>       - we never want to have CPUID say "yes" to these, since
>         monitor/mwait support will be clunky in the best case,
>         and hlt is overwhelmingly preferable! [*]
> 
> 3. Never check CPUID, use monitor/mwait with abandon
>       - OS X 10.6 .. 10.8 does this
>       - emulating monitor/mwait here allows us to boot the guest
>         and use it, and perform sysadmin surgery to force a hlt
>         based idle
> 
> 4. Check CPUID, panic if unavailable
>       - OS X 10.5 did this, IIRC.
>       - whether I can do kext surgery and get it to stop checking
>         CPUID *in addition to* falling back to hlt-based idle is
>         TBD.
>       - emulating monitor/mwait allows us to boot this type of
>         guest, BUT WE ALSO HAVE TO ADVERTISE IT VIA CPUID !!!

As it is right now, #4 is not being addressed (and we can't just
advertise mwait via cpuid, or we'd be screwing up #2).

I also feel a bit weird about the "undocumented feature" aspect
of NOT generating an invalid opcode for something that *should*
be an invalid opcode according to the feature set advertised via
cpuid...

So if there's a way to make it so we can tell QEMU/KVM to
"--enable-mwait" on a per-guest basis, I think that'd be better
than an always-on "undocumented" behavior...

But then again, I'm most likely missing something about the big
picture... :)

Thanks much,
--Gabriel
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Reply via email to