Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] x86/emulate: add support of emulating SSE2 instruction {, v}movd mm, r32/m32 and {, v}movq mm, r64

From: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
To: "Mihai Donțu" <mdontu@bitdefender.com>,
	"Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@suse.com>
Cc: Zhi Wang <zhi.a.wang@intel.com>, xen-devel@lists.xen.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] x86/emulate: add support of emulating SSE2 instruction {, v}movd mm, r32/m32 and {, v}movq mm, r64
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2016 15:53:56 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <82a9354b-8a21-da20-634f-094b9162847c@citrix.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20160801174833.5a20f846@bitdefender.com>

On 01/08/16 15:48, Mihai Donțu wrote:
> On Monday 01 August 2016 07:43:20 Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>>> Your suggestion makes sense, but I'm starting to doubt my initial
>>>>> patch. :-) I'm testing "movq xmm1, xmm1" and noticing that it takes the
>>>>> GPR-handling route and I can't seem to be able to easily prevent it
>>>>> with !(rex_prefix & REX_B), as rex_prefix == 0 and vex.b == 1. I need
>>>>> to take a harder look at how that class of instructions is coded.    
>>>> You obviously need to distinguish the two kinds of register sources/
>>>> destinations: GPRs need suitable re-writing of the instruction (without
>>>> having looked at the most recent version of the patch yet I btw doubt
>>>> converting register to memory operands is the most efficient model),
>>>> while MMs, XMMs, and YMMs can retain their register encoding.  
>>> Regarding efficiency, I'm not married with the approach I've proposed.
>>> If you can give me a few more hints, I can give it a try.  
>> I'd rather pick a fixed register and update the regs->... field from that
>> after the stub was executed. E.g. using rAX and treating it just like a
>> return value of the "call". But maybe I'm imagining this easier than it
>> really is; as an alternative I'd then suggest really following what Andrew
>> said - use a pointer into regs->, not mmvalp. But (as said in the review
>> mail) you'd then have the problem of the missing zero-extension for
>> writes to 32-bit GPRs
> I thought that by re-using (hijacking, really) mmvalp, the patch will
> look less intrusive and thus not add too much to an already complex
> code.
>
> Assuming I'll just pass to the stub "a"(ea.reg), would it be a good
> idea to just zero-out the 64bit register before that? It does not
> appear to be any instructions that write just the low dword. Or am I
> misunderstanding the zero-extension concept?

Any write to a 32bit GPR zero extends it to 64 bits.  This is specified
by AMD64 and only applies to 32bit writes.  8 and 16 bit writes leave
the upper bits alone.

Therefore movd %mm, %eax will move 32bits from %mm to eax, then zero
extend the upper 32 bits of %rax.

~Andrew

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