Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 10/24] xen: mask XSAVE from cpuid

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Fri Mar 13 2009 - 11:13:34 EST


Jan Beulich wrote:
As pointed out on an earlier thread, it seems inappropriate to do probing
like this when there is a cpuid feature flag (osxsave) that can be used to
determine whether XSAVE can be used. And even without that flag,
simply reading CR4 and checking whether osxsave is set there would
suffice. This is under the assumption that Xen's to-be-done implementation
of XSAVE support would match that of FXSAVE (Xen turns its support on
unconditionally and for all [pv] guests).

I didn't want to make too many assumptions about how Xen's XSAVE support would look. In particular, I thought it might virtualize the state of OSXSAVE to give the guest the honour of appearing to enable it. A guest kernel may get confused if it starts with OSXSAVE set, as it may use it to control its own init logic.

J
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