Re: [patch] SMP alternatives

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Linus Torvalds wrote:

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
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The lock prefix '0F' is used for a lot of opcodes other than "lock". Go check the instruction set reference. It's not trivial what you are proposing. Intel has a pretty hacked up opcode map with a lot of history. The bit should be in
CR4 and not CR3.

J
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