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SubjectRe: MSR support for x86
On Fri, 28 Feb 1997, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> btw, have you seen www.intel.com and www.x86.org already? LOTS of docs
> there. I think the MSRs are described to some level in the P6 manuals.

good suggestion :)

> nice interface ;) I think the 'official' minor number can wait until this
> gets into the kernel? You have choosen the correct major number :)

it's 10 142 now.

> have you tried putting NULL to the 'open' function?

yes, I have and it gave me a GPF.
have a look at the code in ./drivers/char/misc.c
the open function is called without checking for NULL

> one more thing. What do you think, where is the right place to put 'enable
> cache/disable cache' functionality? They are driven through the cr[0123]
> registers in the CPU, not through MSR. I think these two concepts should
> be integrated somehow. Maybe writing to offset 0123 should set cr[0123]
> (i would hard-coded mask off certain bits, nobody should be able to
> disable paging accidentally :)

This is an interesting suggestion :)
If we implement this, it should be tightly secured since any user could
mess around with the 2nd level cache. A possible application could be a
CPU manager!

I'd like comments on how to do it. It should be quite flexible to allow
the addition of new instructions.

Mapping the control registers to MSR offsets is a bad idea since there
might turn up some MSRs right there.

> but i dont know the details, only the final goal: to be able to 'mess
> around' with machine specific settings in an integrated fashion.

In other words, to have fun. :)

> Ingo

Cheers, Stephan

-----------------------------------------------
Stephan Meyer
+49-89-4301114
Stephan.Meyer@munich.netsurf.de
http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~meyer/
-----------------------------------------------


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