On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 02:11:30PM +0100, Marc Zyngier wrote: > On Tue, 16 May 2023 12:55:14 +0100, > Cornelia Huck <cohuck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Do you have more concrete ideas for QEMU CPU models already? Asking > > because I wanted to talk about this at KVM Forum, so collecting what > > others would like to do seems like a good idea :) > > I'm not being asked, but I'll share my thoughts anyway! ;-) > > I don't think CPU models are necessarily the most important thing. > Specially when you look at the diversity of the ecosystem (and even > the same CPU can be configured in different ways at integration > time). Case in point, Neoverse N1 which can have its I/D caches made > coherent or not. And the guest really wants to know which one it is > (you can only lie in one direction). > > But being able to control the feature set exposed to the guest from > userspace is a huge benefit in terms of migration. > > Now, this is only half of the problem (and we're back to the CPU > model): most of these CPUs have various degrees of brokenness. Most of > the workarounds have to be implemented by the guest, and are keyed on > the MIDR values. So somehow, you need to be able to expose *all* the > possible MIDR values that a guest can observe in its lifetime. > > I have a vague prototype for that that I'd need to dust off and > finish, because that's also needed for this very silly construct > called big-little... And the third half of the problem is all of the other IP bits that get strung together into an SOC :) Errata that live beyond the CPU can become guest-visible (interconnect for example) and that becomes a bit difficult to express to the guest OS. So, beyond something like a big-little VM where the rest of the IP should be shared, I'm a bit fearful of migrating a VM cross-system. But hey, userspace is in the drivers seat and it can do as it pleases. Hopefully we wouldn't need a KVM-specific PV interface for MIDR enumeration. Perhaps the errata management spec could be expanded to describe a set of CPU implementations and associated errata... -- Thanks, Oliver
