[libvirt] [RFC] 5-level paging Support

[Feng, Shaohe]

On 2017年12月13日 21:42, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 08:43:38PM +0800, Feng, Shaohe  wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Now both qemu and kvm support 5-level paging.
>>
>> We can start qemu with a "cpu,+la57" to set 57-bit vitrual address space.
>>
>> So VM can be aware that it need to enable  5-level paging.
>>
>>
>> We can also set another "cpu,phys-bits=52" to set the VM physical address
>> space.
>>
>> Actually, VM can still turn on 5 level paging even without "phys-bits=52",
>> yet this means
>>
>> the guest physical address width are limited, meaning less practical
>> benefits.
>>
>>
>> In to support 5-level paging, I suggest to add  two attribute for the domain
>> cpu element in libvirt.
>>
>> <cpu la57='yes', phys-bits='52'\>
> This doesn't make sense - 'la57' is just a CPU feature like any other
> CPU feature reported in /proc/cpuinfo. IOW, we should just have
>
>     <cpu>
>         ....
>        <feature name="la57" policy="require"/>
>     </cpu>
>
>
>> If la57='yes',  libvirt will probe the host capability, and will throw error
>> if hardware does support la57.
> I'm not seeing why we need to special case la57 handling, when we can just
> use standard CPUID checks we already have
>
>> If la57='yes',  even phys-bits less than 52, libvirt will also pass it to
>> qemu though less practical benefits.
> I would suggest separating la57 from phys-bits, as they're actually
> completely independant features. They merely happen to be commonly
> used at the same time.
agree, keep them independant.

And still keep phys-bits as attribute of cpu element?
<cpu phys-bits='52'>
     ....
     <feature name="la57" policy="require"/>
</cpu>
>
> Regards,
> Daniel

BR

Shaohe Feng