On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 8:51 AM, David Laight <david.lai...@aculab.com> wrote:
>
> SWAPGS is a PITA. The hardware designers should have tried to write
> all the interrupt handling code.
That's actually my biggest beef with x86-64. The kernel entry/exit is
completely misdesigned.
That was actually better in the original i386, which handles nesting
ok (modulo the NMI disable flag and the STI shadow bit which doesn't
save/restore properly).
Yes, the 386 model of infinite indirection through IDT/GDT/TSS is
broken and should have had a mode bit to just replace with a simple
"use this stack and address for kernel entry" MSR register - but that
simplified kernel entry/exit should have saved/restored _more_ info,
not less (eg "save/restore segment shadow state rather than the
descriptor number that needs the insane indirection" etc)
The problem was never the few push/pop instructions that kernel entry involved.
The entry/exit garbage admittedly started before x86-64 itself - all
those 'syscall' variants are equally broken. Not saving/restoring
state properly is just unbelievable sh*t. x86-64 then made things
worse with SWAPGS etc.
A lot of people hate x86 because of instruction decoding. No, if you
need a reason to dislike x86, it's because of exception handling and
iret.
Rant over.
Linus
