On 21/08/20 11:48, Borislav Petkov wrote: >> It's not like we grab MSRs every day. The user-return notifier restores >> 6 MSRs (7 on very old processors). The last two that were added were >> MSR_TSC_AUX itself in 2009 (!) and MSR_IA32_TSX_CTRL last year. > What about "If it is a shared resource, there better be an agreement > about sharing it." is not clear? > > It doesn't matter how many or which resources - there needs to be a > contract for shared use so that shared use is possible. It is that > simple. Sure, and I'll make sure to have that discussion the next time we add a shared MSR in 2029. In the meanwhile: * for the syscall MSRs, patches to share them were reviewed by hpa and peterz so I guess there's no problem. * for MSR_TSC_AUX, which is the one that is causing problems, everybody seems to agree with just using LSL (in the lack specific numbers on performance improvements from RDPID). * for MSR_IA32_TSX_CTRL.RTM_DISABLE, which is the only one that was added in the last 10 years, I'm pretty sure there are no plans for using the Trusty Sidechannel eXtension in the kernel. So that should be fine too. (The CPUID_CLEAR bit of the MSR is not shared). Thanks, Paolo
