When running in a virtual machine, switching to real mode may be
expensive. Allow interrupts to be enabled while in protected mode and
reflected down to the real-mode interrupt handlers.
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
We currently use flat real mode wherever real mode is required. This
guarantees that we will not surprise some unsuspecting external caller
which has carefully set up flat real mode by suddenly reducing the
segment limits to 64kB.
However, operating in flat real mode imposes a severe performance
penalty in some virtualisation environments, since some CPUs cannot
fully virtualise flat real mode and so the hypervisor must fall back
to emulation. In particular, operating under KVM on a pre-Westmere
Intel CPU will be at least an order of magnitude slower, to the point
that there is a visible teletype effect when printing anything to the
BIOS console. (Older versions of KVM used to cheat and ignore the
"flat" part of flat real mode, which masked the problem.)
Switch (back) to using genuine real mode with 64kB segment limits
instead of flat real mode. Hopefully this won't break anything.
Add an explicit switch to flat real mode before returning to the BIOS
from the ROM prefix, since we know that a PMM BIOS will call the ROM
initialisation point (and potentially the BEV) in flat real mode.
As noted in previous commit messages, it is not possible to restore
the real-mode segment limits after a transition to protected mode,
since there is no way to know which protected-mode segment descriptor
was originally used to initialise the limit portion of the segment
register.
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
The symbol_text16 is defined globally by the linker. Use rm_text16
instead of _text16 for the local variable within librm.S to avoid
confusion when reading linker maps.
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
Use the shared code in libflat to perform the A20 transitions
automatically on each transition from real to protected mode. This
allows us to remove all explicit calls to gateA20_set().
The old warnings about avoiding automatically enabling A20 are
essentially redundant; they date back to the time when we would always
start hammering the keyboard controller without first checking to see
if gate A20 was already enabled (which it almost always is).
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
When returning to real mode, set 4GB segment limits instead of 64kB
limits. This change improves our chances of successfully returning to
a PMM-capable BIOS aftering entering iPXE during POST; the BIOS will
have set up flat real mode before calling our initialisation point,
and may be disconcerted if we then return in genuine real mode.
This change is unlikely to break anything, since any code that might
potentially access beyond 64kB must use addr32 prefixes to do so; if
this is the case then it is almost certainly code written to expect
flat real mode anyway.
Note that it is not possible to restore the real-mode segment limits
to their original values, since it is not possible to know which
protected-mode segment descriptor was originally used to initialise
the limit portion of the segment register.
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
With a 16-bit operand, lgdt/lidt will load only a 24-bit base address,
ignoring the high-order bits. This meant that we could fail to fully
restore the GDT across a call into gPXE, if the GDT happened to be
located above the 16MB mark.
Not all of our lgdt/lidt instructions require a data32 prefix (for
example, reloading the real-mode IDT can never require a 32-bit base
address), but by adding them everywhere we will hopefully not forget
the necessary ones in future.
real_call(), rather than moving it to the RM stack and back again.
This allows the real-mode function to completely destroy the stack
contents, provided that it manages to return to real_call().
Use .text16.data section with "aw" attributes, to avoid section type
conflicts when placing both code and data into .text16.
Add __from_{text16,data16}.
between the low half stored in the static variable rm_sp, and the high
half stored on the prot_call() stack, because:
Just using the stack would screw up when a prot_call()ed routine
executes a real_call(); it would have no way to find the current top of
the RM stack.
Extending rm_sp to rm_esp would not be safe, because the guarantee that
rm_sp must return to the correct value by the time an external
real-mode call returns applies only to %sp, not to %esp.
from protected-mode code.
Set up %ds to point to .data16 in prot_to_real, so that code specified
via REAL_EXEC() and friends can access variables in .data16.
Move most real-mode librm variables from .text16 to .data16.
Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Daniel Verkamp
Stefan Hajnoczi