Re: [RFC,05/10] x86/speculation: Add basic IBRS support infrastructure

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Paolo Bonzini (pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> On 29/01/2018 22:13, Andi Kleen wrote:
> >> What happens when someone introduces a
> >> workaround tied to some other model numbers?
> > There are already many of those in the tree for other issues and features. 
> > So far you managed to survive without. Likely that will be true
> > in the future too.
> 
> "Guests have to live with processor fuckups" is actually a much better
> answer than "Hypervisors may need to revisit their practice", since at
> least it's clear where the blame lies.
> 
> Because really it's just plain luck.  It just happens that most errata
> are for functionality that is not available to a virtual machine (e.g.
> perfmon and monitor workarounds or buggy TSC deadline timer that
> hypervisors emulate anyway), that only needs a chicken bit to be set in
> the host, or the bugs are there only for old hardware that doesn't have
> virtualization (X86_BUG_F00F, X86_BUGS_SWAPGS_FENCE).
> 
> CPUID flags are guaranteed to never change---never come, never go away.
> For anything that doesn't map nicely to a CPUID flag, you cannot really
> express it.  Also if something is not architectural, you can pretty much
> assume that you cannot know it under virtualization.  f/m/s is not
> architectural; family, model and stepping mean absolutely nothing when
> running in virtualization, because the host CPU model can change under
> your feet at any time.  We force guest vendor == host vendor just
> because otherwise too much stuff breaks, but that's it.

In some ways we've been luckiest on x86; my understanding is ARM have a
similar set of architecture-specific errata and aren't really sure
how to expose this to guests either.

Dave

> Paolo
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@xxxxxxxxxx / Manchester, UK