4 ms·
The problem (requiring the cold reboot of the VM) is that they masked the PCID bit off in the CPUID, so the VM thinks it is running on a CPU that doesn't suppor
by kijiki 9y ago
The problem (requiring the cold reboot of the VM) is that they masked the PCID bit off in the CPUID, so the VM thinks it is running on a CPU that doesn't support PCID. Obviously they've stopped doing this with the new update, but you have to cold reboot (not warm) for the newly enabled feature to be visible.
Presumably they did this to make it possible to hot migrate VMs between old hosts that don't support PCID, and new ones that do. Which, with hindsight, was not a good tradeoff.
- derefr 9y agoGiven that Linux (and most other VM guest OSes of note) support CPU hotplug, shouldn't vMotion have just given the VM a new, second CPU with PCID, and then removed the first one?
- kijiki 9y agoGiven the history of CPU hot plug, it has always been generally assumed that all the CPUs in an SMP are identical (hence the S in SMP). I'm not aware of any OS that supports differing feature sets, and if one exists, it almost certainly goes with the least common denominator feature set.