On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 04:26:50PM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote:
KVM allows trap and emulate (read: NOP) of the MONITOR and MWAIT
instructions. There is work undergoing to enable actual execution
of these inside of KVM, but nobody really wants to expose the feature
to the guest by default, as it would eat up all of the host CPU.
Isn't this something that should be reported using
KVM_GET_EMULATED_CPUID? (QEMU still doesn't know how to use
KVM_GET_EMULATED_CPUID, however.)
So today there is no streamlined way to actually notify the guest that
it's ok to execute MONITOR / MWAIT, even when we want to explicitly
leave the guest in guest context.
I'm not familiar with the variables involved in this decision.
How exactly would somebody (human or software) determine if it's
really ok to let the guest execute MONITOR / MWAIT?
Under what circumstances do you expect this to be used? Is this
just for debugging and development?
This patch adds a new -cpu parameter called "mwait" which - when
enabled - force enables the MONITOR / MWAIT CPUID flag, even when
the underlying accel framework does not explicitly advertise support.
If you really want something that makes QEMU ignore what the
accel code is reporting, I would prefer a syntax that could be
used for other features too, like "-cpu ...,monitor=force".