In a recent commit (99f85a28a78e96d28907fe036e1671a218fee597), KVM disabled the passthrough of this port due to known problems on certain HP laptops (see http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0712.3/0872.html and http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0801.0/2388.html). While I''d say that doing this globally just because of laptops may not be the right thing in Xen, it would seem that a DMI based approach like is being used in recent kernels (to replace the use of port 0x80 with 0xED) might still be desirable. Opinions? Thanks, Jan _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
I think I would go with the DMI approach, as passing through port 0x80 has some significant HVM guest boot-time wins IIRC. -- Keir On 10/06/2009 13:20, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@novell.com> wrote:> In a recent commit (99f85a28a78e96d28907fe036e1671a218fee597), KVM > disabled the passthrough of this port due to known problems on certain HP > laptops (see http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0712.3/0872.html > and http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0801.0/2388.html). While > I''d say that doing this globally just because of laptops may not be the right > thing in Xen, it would seem that a DMI based approach like is being used in > recent kernels (to replace the use of port 0x80 with 0xED) might still be > desirable. > > Opinions? > > Thanks, Jan > > > _______________________________________________ > Xen-devel mailing list > Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com > http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel_______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Jan Beulich wrote:> In a recent commit (99f85a28a78e96d28907fe036e1671a218fee597), KVM > disabled the passthrough of this port due to known problems on certain HP > laptops (see http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0712.3/0872.html > and http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0801.0/2388.html). While > I''d say that doing this globally just because of laptops may not be the right > thing in Xen, it would seem that a DMI based approach like is being used in > recent kernels (to replace the use of port 0x80 with 0xED) might still be > desirable.I don''t think the passthrough matters much in Xen. The current xenbits kernel uses unconditionally port 0x80, so on the buggy laptops the user probably will not even succeed in booting dom0. (They could in principle use another OS than Linux as dom0, of course). So, the first step should be to backport from upstream the changes to use port 0xED on those machines. Also, on KVM there was (presumably) no performance loss from the removal of the pass-through, because KVM is using pv_ops to avoid the outs to port 0x80 in their guests. The same could be done for domU in Xen (domU does not deal with buggy hardware). With both these steps in place, the pass-through could be disabled with no performance issues. Actually it would be enough to disable it on SVM with a patch as simple as the attached one. Paolo _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel