Re: [Xen-devel] Xen's use of PAT and PV guests

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 01:35 +0100, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

> It therefore seems to me that if I make Linux:
> 
>    1. never set the PAT flag (which it won't anyway),
>    2. check that the value written to IA32_PAT is as expected, but
>       otherwise ignore it, and
>    3. use WT rather than WC
> 
> then it all should just work.

I had a patch ages ago (which I have now lost) that caused the kernel to
read back the PAT MSR after writing it and try and locate a suitable
entry for each cache setting it was interested in (with fallbacks as
appropriate) to use dynamically thereafter.

This has the nice property that Linux could write what it really wanted
to the PAT register but it would then read and use whatever it actually
ended up with.

I'm not sure that this scheme is at all upstreamable though.

Ian.



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