With the current setup, a 10nm Icelake CPU, such as the Intel Xeon Gold
6338, will be incorrectly recognized by libvirt as a 14nm broadwell CPU due
to the mpx label. See
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libvirt/+bug/1978064. When adding
the removed tag to mpx in the Icelake xml definition, it is then correctly
determined. Would there be a better way of going about making this
distinction for 10nm Icelake processors?

Thanks,
Lena Voytek

On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 1:59 AM Jiri Denemark <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 10:01:16 +0200, Peter Krempa wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 15, 2022 at 14:11:49 -0700, Lena Voytek wrote:
> > > Intel has removed MPX capabilities from 10nm Icelake CPUs[1], which is
> > > reflected by the new models through the line marking mpx as removed.
> > >
> > > The original Icelake Server models have been left alone to avoid
> regressions.
> > >
> > > This adds:
> > > -Icelake-Server-noMPX
> > > -Icelake-Server-noTSX-noMPX
> >
> > I didn't find this model in qemu, so this looks like you are inventing a
> > new model in libvirt.
> >
> > While I'm not libvirt's expert on CPUs, but as far as I know libvirt
> > does not invent our own CPU model names.
> >
> > In case of the 'noTSX' versions they were present named in such way in
> > qemu. The only reason we keep them is historical, but in qemu such
> > naming was already deprecated.
> >
> > > References:
> > >
> > >     [1] Memory Protection Extensions support removal
> > >
> https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000059823/processors.html
> > >
> > > Fixes: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libvirt/+bug/1978064
> > >        https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/issues/304
> >
> > In this issue I've linked the appropriate qemu commit, but according to
> > the commit message it seems that the MPX feature was dropped just in
> > certain machine types.
> >
> > This will most likely mean that libvirt will not be able to delete it
> > out of the definition, because we need to be able to preserve
> > compatibility and VM ABI.
>
> Right. Also the feature is only removed from 10nm CPUs, while 14nm CPUs
> of the same generation still support it.
>
> So what is the actual issue you're trying to fix here? In other words,
> what steps did you do and what error or incorrect behavior did you see?
>
> Jirka
>
>

Reply via email to