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authorWill Auld <will.auld.intel@gmail.com>2012-11-29 12:42:50 -0800
committerMarcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>2012-11-30 18:29:30 -0200
commitba904635d498fea43fc3610983f9dc430ac324e4 (patch)
treedcfcf9817a3a907950520d72b677077ecced7e01 /virt
parent8fe8ab46be06fcd9abfe6fe9928fd95b54ab079a (diff)
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KVM: x86: Emulate IA32_TSC_ADJUST MSR
CPUID.7.0.EBX[1]=1 indicates IA32_TSC_ADJUST MSR 0x3b is supported Basic design is to emulate the MSR by allowing reads and writes to a guest vcpu specific location to store the value of the emulated MSR while adding the value to the vmcs tsc_offset. In this way the IA32_TSC_ADJUST value will be included in all reads to the TSC MSR whether through rdmsr or rdtsc. This is of course as long as the "use TSC counter offsetting" VM-execution control is enabled as well as the IA32_TSC_ADJUST control. However, because hardware will only return the TSC + IA32_TSC_ADJUST + vmsc tsc_offset for a guest process when it does and rdtsc (with the correct settings) the value of our virtualized IA32_TSC_ADJUST must be stored in one of these three locations. The argument against storing it in the actual MSR is performance. This is likely to be seldom used while the save/restore is required on every transition. IA32_TSC_ADJUST was created as a way to solve some issues with writing TSC itself so that is not an option either. The remaining option, defined above as our solution has the problem of returning incorrect vmcs tsc_offset values (unless we intercept and fix, not done here) as mentioned above. However, more problematic is that storing the data in vmcs tsc_offset will have a different semantic effect on the system than does using the actual MSR. This is illustrated in the following example: The hypervisor set the IA32_TSC_ADJUST, then the guest sets it and a guest process performs a rdtsc. In this case the guest process will get TSC + IA32_TSC_ADJUST_hyperviser + vmsc tsc_offset including IA32_TSC_ADJUST_guest. While the total system semantics changed the semantics as seen by the guest do not and hence this will not cause a problem. Signed-off-by: Will Auld <will.auld@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
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