[Xen-devel] Re: x86 emulator and new isa additions

[Keir Fraser <keir@xxxxxxx>]

On 15/11/2011 13:03, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Keir,
> 
> so far the convention seems to be to assume that guest attempts to
> execute instructions not supported by the underlying CPU would never
> make it into the emulator. Is that really correct (in particular in the
> context of real mode emulation, where it's not just single instructions
> that get emulated)?
> 
> From earlier work on the emulation code I seem to recall that it's mainly
> the testing code that didn't like use of cpu_has_xyz in conditionals. I
> would suppose that simply adding respective feature detection (and
> boolean variables) to the testing code should get us around this
> problem. Or would you see any better alternative?

I'm fine to have further feature checks in the emulator, but I would like to
keep the emulator core clean. And indeed the emulator probably ought to act
based on features advertised to the *guest* rather than the *host*?

So, properly, I think the fact we already have a cpuid callback ought to be
sufficient to implement all the cpu_has functionality that the emulator
could want, perhaps hidden behind some helper/abstraction functions/macros.

The question would then be whether that is fast enough. My guess is it would
be, and I'd rather do it that way, or close to that way, in the first
instance at least, and then optimise later if we see the need.

 -- Keir

> Jan
> 



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