linux-kernel - "Paravisor" Feature Enumeration

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Message-ID: <c4ef08a6-5600-4604-9e40-bd3263a0dcd3@intel.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2026 13:42:26 -0800
From: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>
To: "Lange, Jon" <jlange@...rosoft.com>
Cc: "Williams, Dan J" <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
 Sean Christopherson <seanjc@...gle.com>, Paolo Bonzini
 <pbonzini@...hat.com>, john.starks@...rosoft.com,
 Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@....com>,
 "linux-coco@...ts.linux.dev" <linux-coco@...ts.linux.dev>,
 LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
 "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@...ux.intel.com>,
 "Edgecombe, Rick P" <rick.p.edgecombe@...el.com>,
 Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@...rix.com>
Subject: "Paravisor" Feature Enumeration

First,

Jon and John gave a talk in Tokyo about feature enumeration under
paravisors:

> https://lpc.events/event/19/contributions/2188/attachments/1896/4057/05-Paravisor-Integration-with-Confidential-Services.pdf

The tl;dr for me at least was that they'd like a common and consistent
means of enumerating these features in OSes, regardless of the
environment: TDX, SEV-SNP or even ARM CCA.

I wanted to explore one corner of the solution space a bit. There was a
pretty limited audience of folks in the room. Please feel free to flesh
out the cc list with anyone I missed.

Dan Williams' first thought seemed to revolve around having some kind of
platform-independent device that could do the enumeration. Maybe a
synthetic PCI device. I'm sure Dan can chime in to fill in the details
that I missed.

I immediately just thought of CPUID. We already have a whole region of
CPUID (0x40000000) that hypervisors use to enumerate stuff to guests by
convention. It wouldn't be a large leap at all to carve out a chunk of
that so that paravisors can use it.

But the biggest barrier I see there is that our ARM friends don't have
CPUID. It seems like they _mostly_ have bit-by-bit aliases in ACPI or
DeviceTree for the x86 CPUID bits, like:

	X86_FEATURE_KVM_CLOCKSOURCE in arm,pvclock
or
	X86_FEATURE_KVM_STEAL_TIME  in arm,kvm-steal-time

As far as I can tell, these aliases are all done ad-hoc. This approach
could obviously be extended to paravisor features, but it would probably
be on the slow side to do it for each new feature.

It _seems_ like we could pick a chunk of CPUID space (say 32-bits of it)
and alias it 1:1 with some DeviceTree/ACPI property, say
"arm,paravisor-features". Kernel code would just be written to say
"check feature 13" and the arch-specific helpers would either steer that
to CPUID or DeviceTree.

Is there anything like that today that's cross-architecture and
cross-hypervisor? Is there anything stopping us from carving out a chunk
of CPUID for this purpose?