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Re: [Xen-devel] Questioning the Xen Design of the VMM

To: "Petersson, Mats" <Mats.Petersson@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Questioning the Xen Design of the VMM
From: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 12:39:29 -0400
Cc: Al Boldi <a1426z@xxxxxxxxx>, xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Mats, thanks for the examples of where the hypervisor needs to know otherwise x86 guest doesn't do what it expects to be done.

I've just recently started working with Xen, but my background has been more with other architectures than x86. I understand all that you explained, but one: see below. (I'm posting to the list so that others can learn too ;)

Petersson, Mats wrote:

[ snipped a lot of good info ]


Another problem is "hidden bits" in registers.
Let's say this:

        mov     cr0, eax
        mov     eax, ecx
        or      $1, eax
        mov     eax, cr0
        mov     $0x10, eax
        mov     eax, fs
        mov     ecx, cr0
        
        mov     $0xF000000, eax
        mov     $10000, ecx
$1:
        mov     $0, fs:eax
        add     $4, eax
        dec     ecx
        jnz     $1

Let's now say that we have an interrupt that the hypervisor would handle
in the loop in the above code. The hypervisor itself uses FS for some
special purpose, and thus needs to save/restore the FS register. When it
returns, the system will crash (GP fault) because the FS register limit
is 0xFFFF (64KB) and eax is greater than the limit - but the limit of FS
was set to 0xFFFFFFFF before we took the interrupt... Incorrect
behaviour like this is terribly difficult to deal with, and there really
isn't any good way to solve these issues [other than not allowing the
code to run when it does "funny" things like this - or to perform the
necessary code in "translation mode" - i.e. emulate each instruction ->
slow(ish)].

The above I'm confused on. In x86, the hypervisor can't store the fs register fully before returning from the interrupt?? You stated that the fs register limit was 0xffffffff before the interrupt, but ends up being 0xffff afterwards. As I mentioned, I'm just learning the internals of x86, so my full comprehension on segment registers of x86 is still a little fuzzy.

Could you explain further here?

Thanks,

-- Steve


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