Re: [kvm-devel] [PATCH] Refactor hypercall infrastructure

From: Anthony Liguori
Date: Fri Sep 14 2007 - 17:03:19 EST


Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
Anthony Liguori wrote:
This patch refactors the current hypercall infrastructure to better support live
migration and SMP. It eliminates the hypercall page by trapping the UD
exception that would occur if you used the wrong hypercall instruction for the
underlying architecture and replacing it with the right one lazily.

I guess it would be pretty rude/unlikely for these opcodes to get reused
in other implementations... But couldn't you make the page trap
instead, rather than relying on an instruction fault?

The whole point of using the instruction is to allow hypercalls to be used in many locations. This has the nice side effect of not requiring a central hypercall initialization routine in the guest to fetch the hypercall page. A PV driver can be completely independent of any other code provided that it restricts itself to it's hypercall namespace.

It also introduces the infrastructure to probe for hypercall available via
CPUID leaves 0x40000002. CPUID leaf 0x40000003 should be filled out by
userspace.

Is this compatible with Xen's (and other's) use of cpuid? That is,
0x40000000 returns a hypervisor-specific signature in e[bcd]x, and eax
has the max hypervisor leaf.

Xen is currently using 0/1/2. I had thought it was only using 0/1. The intention was not to squash Xen's current CPUID usage so that it would still be possible for Xen to make use of the guest code. Can we agree that Xen won't squash leaves 3/4 or is it not worth trying to be compatible at this point?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

J

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