Re: Use CPUID to communicate with the hypervisor.

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Tue Sep 30 2008 - 05:20:50 EST


Nakajima, Jun wrote:
On 9/29/2008 12:37:23 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
Gleb Natapov wrote:
Can this interface be used to pass variable sized data from a
hypervisor to a gust? ACPI or DMI tables for instance.

In theory it can, but it would be a bad idea. cpuid is best used to
communicate cpu features; ACPI and DMI are (mostly) system features.

Also, we have reserved the MSRs from 0x40000000 - 0x400000FF for software use. We could use such MSRs, but what's the benefits of using those when ACPI already defined the detection mechanism?


Features that the guest needs to enable very early on, before ACPI is up. I don't think there are many of those.

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