Re: [PATCH 1/2] VMware detection support for x86 and x86-64

From: Valdis . Kletnieks
Date: Fri Sep 26 2008 - 08:28:04 EST


On Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:27:41 PDT, "H. Peter Anvin" said:
> Zachary Amsden wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 14:59 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> >> should have disappeared in the early 1990's, and it's really disturbing
> >> that virtualization vendors -- not just VMWare -- are, in effect,
> >> re-making all the mistakes hardware vendors did in the 1980's.
...
> This, of course, is what CPUID is for.

I remember from my old mainframe days that IBM actually got this right all the
way back in 1967 for the *first* product called VM - the 'Store CPUID'
instruction would give a specified result when executed on bare iron, but if
you did it inside a virtual machine running under CP-67 it would give a
documented different value that couldn't happen on bare iron.

So this mistake goes back a lot further than the 80s... :)


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