Re: [PATCH 7/9] KVM/VMX: Emulate MSR_IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES

From: Paolo Bonzini
Date: Mon Feb 19 2018 - 09:07:21 EST


On 19/02/2018 14:35, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2018-02-19 at 14:10 +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>>> Hardware seems like a reasonable place to get the default value (cf.
>>> the VMX capability MSRs).
>>
>> There are some differences:
>>
>> - a zero value for ARCH_CAPABILITIES should be safe, while a zero value
>> for VMX capabilities doesn't really make sense. On the contrary, a
>> nonzero value for ARCH_CAPABILITIES is not safe across live migration.
>
> Any VMM which is going to support live migration surely needs to pay at
> least a small amount of attention to the features it exposes? Exposing
> the ARCH_CAPABILITIES CPUID bit without actually looking at the
> contents of the associated MSR which that bit advertises would be... a
> little strange, would it not?Â

I think what we should do is simply backport Tom Lendacky's series to
4.14 and 4.9 ASAP, and add ARCH_CAPABILITIES support there. Then the
question of the default becomes moot, more or less.

Paolo

> I don't see why we care so much about the *default* value, in that
> context.