Re: [RFC PATCH v2 21/34] x86/msr: Utilize the alternatives mechanism to write MSR

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx>]

On April 25, 2025 12:01:29 AM PDT, "Jürgen Groß" <jgross@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On 25.04.25 05:44, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> On 4/24/25 18:15, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>> On 4/24/25 01:14, Jürgen Groß wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Actually, that is how we get this patch with the existing alternatives
>>>>> infrastructure.  And we took a step further to also remove the pv_ops
>>>>> MSR APIs...
>>>> 
>>>> And this is what I'm questioning. IMHO this approach is adding more
>>>> code by removing the pv_ops MSR_APIs just because "pv_ops is bad". And
>>>> I believe most refusal of pv_ops is based on no longer valid reasoning.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> pvops are a headache because it is effectively a secondary alternatives 
>>> infrastructure that is incompatible with the alternatives one...
>>> 
>>>>> It looks to me that you want to add a new facility to the alternatives
>>>>> infrastructure first?
>>>> 
>>>> Why would we need a new facility in the alternatives infrastructure?
>>> 
>>> I'm not sure what Xin means with "facility", but a key motivation for this 
>>> is to:
>>> 
>>> a. Avoid using the pvops for MSRs when on the only remaining user thereof 
>>> (Xen) is only using it for a very small subset of MSRs and for the rest it 
>>> is just overhead, even for Xen;
>>> 
>>> b. Being able to do wrmsrns immediate/wrmsrns/wrmsr and rdmsr immediate/ 
>>> rdmsr alternatives.
>>> 
>>> Of these, (b) is by far the biggest motivation. The architectural direction 
>>> for supervisor states is to avoid ad hoc and XSAVES ISA and instead use 
>>> MSRs. The immediate forms are expected to be significantly faster, because 
>>> they make the MSR index available at the very beginning of the pipeline 
>>> instead of at a relatively late stage.
>>> 
>> 
>> Note that to support the immediate forms, we *must* do these inline, or the 
>> const-ness of the MSR index -- which applies to by far the vast majority of 
>> MSR references -- gets lost. pvops does exactly that.
>> 
>> Furthermore, the MSR immediate instructions take a 64-bit number in a single 
>> register; as these instructions are by necessity relatively long, it makes 
>> sense for the alternative sequence to accept a 64-bit input register and do 
>> the %eax/ %edx shuffle in the legacy fallback code... we did a bunch of 
>> experiments to see what made most sense.
>
>Yes, I understand that.
>
>And I'm totally in favor of Xin's rework of the MSR low level functions.
>
>Inlining the MSR access instructions with pv_ops should not be very
>complicated. We do that with other instructions (STI/CLI, PTE accesses)
>today, so this is no new kind of functionality.
>
>I could have a try writing a patch achieving that, but I would only start
>that work in case you might consider taking it instead of Xin's patch
>removing the pv_ops usage for rdmsr/wrmsr. In case it turns out that my
>version results in more code changes than Xin's patch, I'd be fine to drop
>my patch, of course.
>
>
>Juergen

The wrapper in question is painfully opaque, but if it is much simpler, then 
I'm certainly willing to consider it... but I don't really see how it would be 
possible given among other things the need for trap points for the safe MSRs.

Keep in mind this needs to work even without PV enabled!

Note that Andrew encouraged us to pursue the pvops removal for MSRs. Note that 
Xen benefits pretty heavily because it can dispatch the proper path of the few 
that are left for the common case of fixed MSRs.