Re: patch: enabling RDPMC: bit 8 in CR4 (PCE)

From: Maciej W. Rozycki (macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl)
Date: Thu Jan 18 2001 - 11:14:41 EST


On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Tuukka Toivonen wrote:

> I suppose that if the CPU has MMX, then it's ok to write 1 in PCE
> bit. This should be valid for Intel CPUs, but it's certainly possible that
> there are non-Intel CPUs that have MMX but not RDPMC. However, I'd guess
> that writing 1 to PCE bit doesn't do any harm.

 It's not completely OK to write 1 to cr4.pce as you get a GP fault if a
CPU does not support it. However, you may handle the exception yourself
and enable rdpmc unconditionally, i.e. with no feature test (Intel states
cr4.pce is model-specific anyway) -- hopefully no vendor overloads the
cr4.pce bit.

-- 
+  Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland   +
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+        e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available        +

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 23 2001 - 21:00:18 EST