Eduardo Habkost has pointed out that the current documentation of libvirt's CPU feature policy "require" vs. "force" does not match QEMU's behaviour. Update the documentation by spelling out the QEMU version dependency and explain in which scenarios the usage of "policy = 'force'" is applicable or not. Signed-off-by: Kashyap Chamarthy <kchamart(a)redhat.com&gt; --- Wordsmithing / corrections welcome. --- docs/formatdomain.html.in | 13 +++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/formatdomain.html.in b/docs/formatdomain.html.in index 6912762f28..4d6c3892ee 100644 --- a/docs/formatdomain.html.in +++ b/docs/formatdomain.html.in @@ -1566,8 +1566,17 @@ <dl> <dt><code>force</code></dt> - <dd>The virtual CPU will claim the feature is supported regardless - of it being supported by host CPU.</dd> + <dd>The virtual CPU will claim the feature is supported + regardless of it being supported by host CPU -- this is only + true for QEMU version older than 2.9.0. I.e. when using the + CPU mode 'host-model', libvirt identifies which CPU features + to use by looking at host CPUID. For that to take effect, it + is mandatory to use <code>force</code> to tell libvirt that a + said CPU feature must be used despite it not existing in the + host -- this applicable only for a very limited set of CPU + features, such as 'x2apic', virt-ssbd' (for AMD CPUs).</dd> + <dd>However, when using QEMU 2.9.0 and above, there should + never be any need to use <code>force</code>.</dd> <dt><code>require</code></dt> <dd>Guest creation will fail unless the feature is supported by the host CPU or the hypervisor is able to emulate it.</dd> -- 2.17.0