Re: [PATCH v1 7/7] x86/vmx: switch IPT MSRs on vmentry/vmexit

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 17/06/2020 13:51, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 01:54:45PM +0200, Michał Leszczyński wrote:
>> ----- 17 cze 2020 o 11:09, Roger Pau Monné roger.pau@citrix.com napisał(a):
>>
>>> 24 Virtual Machine Control Structures -> 24.8 VM-entry Control Fields -> 24.8.1 VM-Entry Controls
>>> Software should consult the VMX capability MSRs IA32_VMX_ENTRY_CTLS to determine how it should set the reserved bits.
>> Please look at bit position 18 "Load IA32_RTIT_CTL".
> I think this is something different from what I was referring to.
> Those options you refer to (load/clear IA32_RTIT_CTL) deal with
> loading/storing a specific field on the vmcs that maps to the guest
> IA32_RTIT_CTL.
>
> OTOH MSR load lists can be used to load and store any arbitrary MSR on
> vmentry/vmexit, see section 26.4 LOADING MSRS on the SDM. There's
> already infrastructure on Xen to do so, see vmx_{add/del/find}_msr.

If I remember the historic roadmaps correctly, there are 3 cases.

The first hardware to support PT (Broadwell?) prohibited its use
completely in VMX operations.  In this case, we can use it to trace PV
guests iff we don't enable VMX in hardware to begin with.

This was relaxed in later hardware (Skylake?) to permit use within VMX
operations, but without any help in the VMCS.  (i.e. manual context
switching per this patch, or MSR load lists as noted in the SDM.)

Subsequent support for "virtualised PT" was added (IceLake?) which adds
the load/save controls, and the ability to translate the output buffer
under EPT.


All of this is from memory so I'm quite possibly wrong with details, but
I believe this is why the current complexity exists.

~Andrew