lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2005]   [Nov]   [23]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: [patch] SMP alternatives


On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > What I suggested to Intel at the Developer Days is to have a MSR (or, better
> > yet, a bit in the page table pointer %cr0) that disables "lock" in _user_
> > space. Ie a lock would be a no-op when in CPL3, and only with certain
> > processes.
>
> You mean %cr3, right?

Yes.

It _should_ be fairly easy to do something like that - just a simple
global flag that gets set and makes CPL3 ignore lock prefixes. Even timing
doesn't matter - it it takes a hundred cycles for the setting to take
effect, we don't care, since you can't write %cr3 from user space anyway,
and it will certainly take a hundred cycles (and a few serializing
instructions) until we get to CPL3.

I'd personally prefer it to be in %cr3, since we'd have to reload it on
task switching, and that's one of the registers we load anyway. And it
would make sense. But it could be in an MSR too.

Of course, if it's in one of the low 12 bits of %cr3, there would have to
be a "enable this bit" in %cr4 or something. Historically, you could write
any crap in the low bits, I think.

Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2009-11-18 23:46    [W:0.364 / U:0.204 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site