Re: Using All Cores of CPU on Snapdragon Processor during x86-to-ARM User Space Emulation

[Peter Maydell]

On Thu, 14 May 2020 at 11:32, Jakob Bohm <address@hidden> wrote:
> The one exception to this lack was instruction decoding, where certain
> commonly used branch instructions were defined as implicitly picking up
> any changes in instruction memory.  This of cause corresponds to the TCG
> checking for needed retranslation of buffers at those points.

As it happens, QEMU will force retranslation of a buffer for x86
guests even if they modify the immediately next insn, rather than
only picking up the change at the next branch. The x86 target
sets TARGET_HAS_PRECISE_SMC, which enables some extra code that
stops execution of the CPU when a write to the current TB is
detected; all other targets don't set this, because architecturally
it's OK for them to finish execution of the current TB before
picking up the changed code. More generally, we detect self-modifying
code by trapping writes to areas of memory which we've translated
code from, rather than by doing things on the guest CPU events
like icache-flush which the h/w uses to handle SMC.

thanks
-- PMM