[libvirt] cpu flags

[Konrad Rzeszutek]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 10:42:00AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 04:45:09PM -0400, Ben Guthro wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > We're finding that we are going to be needing the cpu flags (as reported 
> > in /proc/cpuinfo)
> > ..specifically to find out if we are a vmx enabled machine.
> > 
> > So - off I went looking into this for a patch to submit upstream.
> > Unfortunately, I ran into some questions which need answering before I 
> > really proceed with this
> > 
> > It seems to me that this info would best be parsed in src/nodeinfo.c
> > This is where other cpuinfo things are parsed...and stored in the 
> > nodeinfo struct
> > Perhaps we store this as a bitmask encoded int, as defined in 
> > /usr/include/asm/cpufeature.h and tack this onto the end of sad struct.
> > 
> > My concern is that adding to the nodeinfo struct breaks the API - such 
> > that the structs will be different sizes between versions.

Would it be possible to hack around this? For example you could use
a unused bit of the old structure to set a flag for 'new-type-of-struct'.
The old libvirt would ignore it, the new one would look for it.
For example if it was an int enty and it was used as a flag entry wherein 
only 4 bits would be used, you could use the 5th bit that would
tell it: "this is version 2 of the struct" and then the libvirt 
would cast it to the new struct which would contain the extra data-bits.

This is how it is done in the RHEL kernels to work-around the kABI.