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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Re: I/O port access handling for PVH



On 11/29/2013 09:19 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 28.11.13 at 12:44, Tim Deegan <tim@xxxxxxx> wrote:
At 11:37 +0000 on 28 Nov (1385635050), George Dunlap wrote:
On 11/28/2013 11:01 AM, Tim Deegan wrote:
At 15:10 +0100 on 21 Oct (1382364606), Jan Beulich wrote:
In particular it would then hopefully be safe to do all that without
the on-stack emulation stub, as this ought to be necessary only
for Dom0, which ought to always have direct access to such
"special" I/O ports. With one apparent caveat: SVM sets
GENERAL1_INTERCEPT_SMI (for a reason that escapes my right
now), and hence control doesn't transfer directly to SMM when
an SMI occurs (and consequently registers aren't expected). But
I would hope that this intercept isn't really needed, and hence
could be dropped at least for PVH guests.
(I realise I'm rather late replying to this - I put it aside and then
only found it again today)

On machines where the BIOS has locked down SMM mode, this
intercept is in fact ignored by the hardware, and that works fine.
So we can drop it for all VMs if it's convenient:

commit a842864f3901078e2a5f4d1cca2f01a72c8d7d13
Author: Tim Deegan <tim@xxxxxxx>
Date:   Thu Nov 28 10:58:42 2013 +0000

      x86/svm: don't intercept SMI.
The SMI intercept is ignored anyway when the BIOS has set the SMMLOCK
      bit in HWCR (see APM v3.21, volume 2, 15.13.3) and it's convenient for
      PVH IO processing to have the SMI handled directly with the guest's
      GPR state (for BIOSes that use SMI as a sort of function call
interface).
Signed-off-by: Tim Deegan <tim@xxxxxxx>
I take it you're not targeting this for 4.4?
Indeed not.  Sorry, I should have said so.
And even more so considering that PVH support on SVM is going
to remain a todo item for after 4.4 anyway.

Yes, I had started to write this, but figured there was no point discussing the merits of accepting it if Tim wasn't asking for it to be accepted. :-)

 -George

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