Re: [PATCH] KVM: Handle MSR_IA32_PERF_CTL

From: Paolo Bonzini
Date: Tue May 31 2016 - 03:54:07 EST


> 2016-05-27 17:22+0200, Radim KrÄmÃÅ:
> > (I wonder why MacOS X doesn't read IA32_PERF_STATUS, though.)
>
> Oh, it maybe does ... we already emulate status and return 0x1000 in its
> bottom 16 bits. I have no idea what is that supposed to mean, but I
> think we should return 0x1000 in IA32_PERF_CTL then.

It's 1000, not 0x1000 (instead, on real hardware the value is typically a
multiple of 256). It was added for Darwin too.

Returning different values is okay, because they are different on real
hardware too:

(sudo dd if=/dev/cpu/0/msr skip=$((0x198)) iflag=skip_bytes bs=8 count=1;
sudo dd if=/dev/cpu/0/msr skip=$((0x199)) iflag=skip_bytes bs=8 count=1) | od -tx8
0000000 00001f3900001100 0000000000001300
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
PERF_STATUS PERF_CTL

And perhaps if we returned non-zero values for PERF_CTL Darwin would try to
write to it. So returning zero is fine, I think. There is no correct answer...

Paolo

> (Would be nice to understand how that 0x1000 happened ... we might want
> 0 in both.)
>