On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 09:49:35AM +0200, Jiri Denemark wrote:
Technically you are correct and even QEMU added this feature to Westmere in April 2013. However, our goal is to provide stable virtual hardware that doesn't change when, e.g., a domain is migrated to another machine (let's ignore the fact we don't currently enforce such stability for CPU models/features because of missing functionality in both QEMU and libvirt). Thus we should not really change existing CPU models. We may be able to do that in the future depending how (if ever) we solve the CPU definition probing in QEMU and how libvirt will make use of it to really enforce stable ABI for guest operating systems.
Right, I see the problem, but am having a bit trouble accepting that all our 20 RHEV-H westmere hypervisors are basicly downgraded to nehalem feature-set permanently because if this, and we probably have to live with these servers for quite some time. If you can't fix existing virtual cpu types, maybe you should add a "westmere-full-feature" cpu type, or similar? And probably also add "rdtscp" which also is missing from the virtual westmere.
Moreover, it's trivial to enable the feature in domain XML:
We're using RHEV, and RHEV-H on all hypervisors, so not so easy to fix for us.. Have opened ticket with Red Hat for this. -jf