RE: [PATCH 4/8] x86/traps: Demand-populate PASID MSR via #GP

[Luck, Tony]

> But the helpers seem to be generic. They take "task" as a parameter and
> handle the task as non-current case. So the helpers are not for PASID only.
> They may be used by others to modify a running task's FPU state. But
> It's not safe to do so.
>
> At least need some comments/restriction for the helpers to be used on
> a running task?

Fenghua,

Correct. When I add some comments I'll make it very clear that it is the
responsibility of the caller to make sure that the task that is targeted
cannot run.

Earlier in this thread Dave suggested there are two cases where these
helpers might be useful:

1) Fork/clone - to set up some xsave state in the child ... but this would be
done before the child is allowed to run.

2) ptrace - this is a "maybe" because ptrace already has code to handle all
the xsave state as a single entity. Perhaps someone might want to change it
to only modify a single feature ... but this seems unlikely. In any case the
ptrace code already "stops" the target process while it is reading/writing state.

-Tony