Re: new CPUID bit

Dave Jones (davej@codemonkey.org.uk)
Wed, 15 Jan 2003 12:18:15 +0000


On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 09:34:28AM +0100, Mikael Pettersson wrote:

> A better reference for this stuff is (IMHO) AP-485, the "Intel Processor
> Identification and the CPUID Instruction" application note. It's regularly
> updated, and in this particular case, its description of CPUID with EAX=1
> differs from the IA32 Volume 2 manual (245471xx) in two ways:
>
> - EBX bit 31 is called "SBF", Signal Break on FERR.
> - ECX is defined to contain additional feature flags. Currently only one
> is defined: ECX bit 10 is the "Context ID" feature for putting the L1
> D-cache in adaptive or shared mode, which matters for hyper-threaded CPUs.
>
> Supporting the new ECX feature flags in the kernel will require some surgery,
> since the current code assumes x86_capability[0] is Intel, [1] is AMD,
> [2] is Transmeta, and [3] is for conflicting or synthesized feature flags.
> We either shift AMD etc down one index and put ECX in [1], or add a new index
> [4] for ECX, or kludge the few ECX-defined features in [3].

Or we change it so we end up with something like..

x86_capability[0].standard and x86_capability[0].extended

Dave

-- 
| Dave Jones.        http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs
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