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RE: [PATCH] softtsc (was RE: [Xen-devel] Guest TSC and Xen (Intel and AM

To: "Keir Fraser" <keir.fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Zhang, Li" <li.zhang@xxxxxxxxx>, "Xen-Devel (E-mail)" <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [PATCH] softtsc (was RE: [Xen-devel] Guest TSC and Xen (Intel and AMD feedback please))
From: "Dan Magenheimer" <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:19:31 -0600
Cc: "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx>
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> Yes, I will take it, but have the following comments.
>  2. Your change in common/keyhandler.c breaks ia64. :-)

Oops! ;-)  What's the best way to handle this?  It would
be unfortunate to lose valuable debug data just because its
arch-dependent but I don't see any other arch-dependent code
in keyhandler.c and I'll bet you don't want to start adding
ifdef's nor introduce arch/xxx/keyhandler.c just for this.

>  1. Why do you define new boolean 'constant_tsc'? Can you just use
> test_bit(X86_FEATURE_CONSTANT_TSC)?
>  3. Your change to arch/x86/time.c looks unnecessary.

I was thinking that the tests for these features should probably
be abstracted (e.g. static inline in a header file or a
global function), but wasn't sure about the best way to deal
with the datatypes (e.g. struct cpuinfo_x86) so defaulted to
global variables.

Both globals are simply for debug output in keyhandler.c
so depending on the answer to (2) above, those patch-parts
could just go away.

>  4. Should you catch SVM's RDTSCP vmexit as well as RDTSC?

I thought I remembered seeing code that reported/lied to guests
that the rdtscp feature was not present?

Thanks,
Dan


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