abieber@ found the latest 9front release ends up in a boot loop if hosted on an AMD system. I tracked it down to 9front (oddly) trying to read the PAT msr prior to writing it. [1] The problem is vmm(4)'s msr handling for svm injects #GP exceptions into the guest for most msr reads (since we don't emulate more than a few).
For those (two? few? dozen?) 9front users of AMD hardware and -current, can you try the below diff? vmm(4)'s vmx msr handlers ignores this instruction and only logs the rdmsr information if the kernel is built with VMM_DEBUG. vmm(4) will advance the instruction pointer regardless and it's up to the guest to deal with any resulting issues. The diff syncs the logic between the svm and vmx msr vm-exit handlers by injecting #GP *ONLY* on attempts to read the SMBASE msr. For context, this is the vmx rdmsr handler's (vmx_handle_rdmsr) logic: switch (*rcx) { case MSR_SMBASE: /* * 34.15.6.3 - Saving Guest State (SMM) * * Unsupported, so inject #GP and return without * advancing %rip. */ ret = vmm_inject_gp(vcpu); return (ret); } It is *not* a design for emulating PAT access and manipulation by a guest. (As an aside, OpenBSD doesn't bother reading the msr [2] before writing to it, neither does Linux. Why is 9front special? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) -Dave [1] https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front/rev/10cd3e23a8c1 [2] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/36fd90dcf1acf2ddb4ef5dbabe5313b3a8d46ee2/sys/arch/amd64/amd64/cpu.c#L1145-L1168 Index: sys/arch/amd64/amd64/vmm.c =================================================================== RCS file: /cvs/src/sys/arch/amd64/amd64/vmm.c,v retrieving revision 1.278 diff -u -p -r1.278 vmm.c --- sys/arch/amd64/amd64/vmm.c 11 Mar 2021 11:16:55 -0000 1.278 +++ sys/arch/amd64/amd64/vmm.c 28 Mar 2021 00:45:08 -0000 @@ -6545,10 +6545,16 @@ svm_handle_msr(struct vcpu *vcpu) *rax = 0; *rdx = 0; break; - default: - DPRINTF("%s: guest read msr 0x%llx, injecting " - "#GP\n", __func__, *rcx); + case MSR_SMBASE: + /* Unsupported, inject #GP w/o advancing %rip */ ret = vmm_inject_gp(vcpu); return (ret); +#ifdef VMM_DEBUG + default: + /* Log the access to identify unknown MSRs */ + DPRINTF("%s: rdmsr exit, msr=0x%llx, data " + "returned to guest=0x%llx:0x%llx\n", + __func__, *rcx, *rdx, *rax); +#endif /* VMM_DEBUG */ } }