Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] qemu-kvm: Add svm cpuid features

[Joerg Roedel]

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 04:29:18PM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:
> > Depends on which Phenom you have. A Phenom II has NRIPSAVE but the old
> > Phenoms don't have it. For the SVM features it is not that important
> > what the host hardware supports but what KVM can emulate. VMCBCLEAN can
> > be emulated without supporting it in the host for example.
> 
> That particular one was my workstation - a Phenom 9550 which is one of
> the early 4-core ones.

Yes, the 9550 don't have the nripsave feature.

> > No, the default CPU type has SVM still enabled by default. I thought
> > about removing the SVM flag from the qemu64 cpu definition but that
> > breaks on TCG where SVM is emulated too.
> > What I implemented in this patch is to enable SVM by default and mask it
> > out if KVM does not support it on the given machine. Problem here is
> > that KVM is currently buggy because it always reports support for SVM,
> > even on Intel machines. I fixed that with patch 29 of my npt-virt
> > patch-set. The patch will hopefully make it into the various stable
> > trees and then we have a clean solution.
> 
> It still won't be clean as it breaks cross vendor migration :(. The
> real fix would be to set the default machine to "kvm64" instead of
> "qemu64" in pc.c when kvm_enabled().

I am not sure that I am the right person to do such an invasive change.
At least not in this patch-set. I could think of removing SVM from the
qemu64 definition and add it again in the TCG specific path.

        Joerg