x86: completely disable NOPL on 32 bits
Completely disable NOPL on 32 bits. It turns out that Microsoft
Virtual PC is so broken it can't even reliably *fail* in the presence
of NOPL.
This leaves the infrastructure in place but disables it
unconditionally.
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c
index 8aab851..4e456bd 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/common.c
@@ -344,31 +344,15 @@
/*
* The NOPL instruction is supposed to exist on all CPUs with
- * family >= 6, unfortunately, that's not true in practice because
+ * family >= 6; unfortunately, that's not true in practice because
* of early VIA chips and (more importantly) broken virtualizers that
- * are not easy to detect. Hence, probe for it based on first
- * principles.
+ * are not easy to detect. In the latter case it doesn't even *fail*
+ * reliably, so probing for it doesn't even work. Disable it completely
+ * unless we can find a reliable way to detect all the broken cases.
*/
static void __cpuinit detect_nopl(struct cpuinfo_x86 *c)
{
- const u32 nopl_signature = 0x888c53b1; /* Random number */
- u32 has_nopl = nopl_signature;
-
clear_cpu_cap(c, X86_FEATURE_NOPL);
- if (c->x86 >= 6) {
- asm volatile("\n"
- "1: .byte 0x0f,0x1f,0xc0\n" /* nopl %eax */
- "2:\n"
- " .section .fixup,\"ax\"\n"
- "3: xor %0,%0\n"
- " jmp 2b\n"
- " .previous\n"
- _ASM_EXTABLE(1b,3b)
- : "+a" (has_nopl));
-
- if (has_nopl == nopl_signature)
- set_cpu_cap(c, X86_FEATURE_NOPL);
- }
}
static void __cpuinit generic_identify(struct cpuinfo_x86 *c)
