2009-07-23 07:52:16

by Michael Tokarev

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Subject: This combination of AMDprocessors is not suitable for SMP?

(yes there's no typo in $subject, it's an old formatting
bug in printk).

When booting kvm guest on an AMD CPU, guest kernel prints
this warning:

WARNING: This combination of AMDprocessors is not suitable for SMP.

be it SMP or UP guest. What's wrong with this "combination",
and can it be fixed?

Thanks!

/mjt


Subject: Re: This combination of AMDprocessors is not suitable for SMP?

Michael Tokarev wrote:
> (yes there's no typo in $subject, it's an old formatting
> bug in printk).
>
> When booting kvm guest on an AMD CPU, guest kernel prints
> this warning:
>
> WARNING: This combination of AMDprocessors is not suitable for SMP.
>
> be it SMP or UP guest. What's wrong with this "combination",
> and can it be fixed?
The qemu64 CPU model KVM injects into the guest lets it see an AMD K7
with 64bit extension. Only some AMD K7 (Athlon-MP) were certified for
SMP support, so this code warns the user about an unsupported hardware.
When running KVM you can ignore this warning, as it only applies to
non-KVM capable processors and has no meaning for virtual SMP anyway.

If you like this warning to disappear, you can use "-cpu host" (and
probably loose migration capability) or wait for the new safe64 CPU
type, which will use family 15 instead of 6.

Regards,
Andre.

--
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 448 3567 12
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