Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Clear VMCS if reusing after vcpu reset

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 30/4/07 08:19, "Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> Furthermore, this need to zap the page a second time is worrying. We
>> only
>> modify architectural state in the VMCS in a well-defined way. That
>> shouldn't
>> upset the hardware. Is this actually an indication that there is some
>> architectural state that we are forgetting to re-initialise? If so then
>> that's the bug which should be fixed.
> 
> Does construct_vmcs need to explicitly care all fields if hardware
> just expects a zero there which can be satisfied by memset()? Anyway,
> I'll take a deeper look to check which unexpected fields are with stale
> content before reset.

Well, we actually write lots of zeroes in construct_vmcs(), so it's not like
we really take advantage of the memset(). And in fact strictly speaking I
don't think we can -- the only architectural interface to the VMCS is via
the stupid VMREAD/VMWRITE instructions. We can make no assumptions about
VMCS layout nor, presumably, field encodings (you might choose to write 1s
for 0s and 0s for 1s in the actual in-memory format, for all I know!).

 -- Keir



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