[libvirt] [RFC] 5-level paging Support

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 08:43:38PM +0800, Feng, Shaohe  wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Now both qemu and kvm support 5-level paging.
> 
> We can start qemu with a "cpu,+la57" to set 57-bit vitrual address space.
> 
> So VM can be aware that it need to enable  5-level paging.
> 
> 
> We can also set another "cpu,phys-bits=52" to set the VM physical address
> space.
> 
> Actually, VM can still turn on 5 level paging even without "phys-bits=52",
> yet this means
> 
> the guest physical address width are limited, meaning less practical
> benefits.
> 
> 
> In to support 5-level paging, I suggest to add  two attribute for the domain
> cpu element in libvirt.
> 
> <cpu la57='yes', phys-bits='52'\>

This doesn't make sense - 'la57' is just a CPU feature like any other
CPU feature reported in /proc/cpuinfo. IOW, we should just have

   <cpu>
       ....
      <feature name="la57" policy="require"/>
   </cpu>


> If la57='yes',  libvirt will probe the host capability, and will throw error
> if hardware does support la57.

I'm not seeing why we need to special case la57 handling, when we can just
use standard CPUID checks we already have

> If la57='yes',  even phys-bits less than 52, libvirt will also pass it to
> qemu though less practical benefits.

I would suggest separating la57 from phys-bits, as they're actually
completely independant features. They merely happen to be commonly
used at the same time.

Regards,
Daniel
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