Re: [Xen-devel] sse, mmx support for hvm guests

[Keir Fraser <keir.fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you would good predictable performance across both systems, at the cost
of missing out on peak performance on the SSE-capable system, then hiding
the feature on the more capable machine would make sense. It's also
obviously easier than hacking in software emulation of SSE/MMX! You should
chase down some more why that feature hiding isn't working for you. It
really should.

 -- Keir

On 29/10/08 07:28, "Ashish Bijlani" <ashish.bijlani@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> i'm working on a project that requires migration of a VM from a
> sse/mmx capable x86 platform to an x86 platform without sse/mmx
> capability. i want to emulate sse/mmu capability at runtime. one
> option would be to let the hypervisor emulate sse/mmx functionality
> upon trapping due to illegal instruction exception. however, i
> believe. this would be really slow and defeats the purpose of sse/mmx.
> i can take the emulation code from qemu/bochs. any idea on what could
> be a better option in terms of performance? also, i'd like to know if
> this is reasonble at all or am i missing something?
> 
> thanks,
> ashish
> 
> On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 4:36 AM, Keir Fraser <keir.fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>> Masking from CPUID should work. I'm surprised it would cause a guest to fail
>> to boot.
>> 
>>  K.
>> 
>> On 25/10/08 23:30, "Ashish Bijlani" <ashish.bijlani@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>>> it's just masking the sse/mmx features from cpuid return value or
>>> something more to it? because i tried masking sse/mmx features from
>>> cpuid and now the hvm domain doesn't boot!! any idea if sse/mmx
>>> support can be disabled using bios?
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Ashish
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 7:13 PM, Keir Fraser <keir.fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On 25/10/08 20:34, "Ashish Bijlani" <ashish.bijlani@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> I've a quad-core x86_64 machine (Intel Xeon), with sse/mmx support.
>>>>> However, I want to disable sse/mmx support from HVM guests. How can I
>>>>> do this? Also, is it reasonable to expect illegal instruction fault in
>>>>> non-root VMX mode if a guest VM runs an application with sse/mmx
>>>>> instructions?
>>>> 
>>>> You can hide SSE/MMX in CPUID info, so the guest should not attempt to use
>>>> the instructions. This is obviously true since CPUID causes vmexit and then
>>>> the instruction is always emulated. But I don't think you can make the
>>>> sse/mmx instructions fault if the guest does actually try to use them
>>>> anyway.
>>>> 
>>>>  -- Keir
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 



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