Re: [RFC][PATCH] tracing/x86: Save CR2 before tracing irqsoff on error_entry

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Thu Mar 21 2019 - 14:37:54 EST


On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 11:25:44AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 11:21 AM Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I dunno. Lots of people at least use to have serious commercial interest in it.
>
> Yes, it used to be a big deal. But full virtualization has gotten a
> lot more common and better.
>
> > Hey Xen folks, how close are we to being able to say "if you want to
> > run a new kernel, you need to switch to PVH or similar"?
>
> I'd also like to know if we could perhaps at least limit PV to just
> the thing that people care most deeply about.
>
> For example, maybe people notice that they really deeply care about
> the PV spinlocks because they help a lot for some loads, but don't
> care so much about the low-level CPU PV stuff any more because modern
> CPUs do _those_ things so well these days.
>
> So it might not be an all-or-nothing thing, but a gradual "let's stop
> supporting xyz under PV, because it causes pain and isn't worth it".

So Juergen recently introduced PARAVIRT_XXL, which are exactly those
bits of PV we can get rid of.

This paravirt-me-harder config does indeed include the CR2 bits.

I recently talked to Andrew Cooper about this, and he said Xen Dom0
still needs all this :/

But yes, I'd _love_ to delete all that in a hurry.