[librm] Remove conditionalisation of the Tivoli VMM workaround

Commit 71560d1 ("[librm] Preserve FPU, MMX and SSE state across calls
to virt_call()") originally introduced the use of "fxsave" and
"fxrstor" to work around a bug in the implementation of memcpy()
within the IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager's VMM.  This commit assumed
(with justification given in the commit message) that SSE support
could be assumed to be present on any realistic in-scope CPU, and so
these instructions may safely be assumed to be supported.

Commit dd9a14d ("[librm] Conditionalize the workaround for the Tivoli
VMM's SSE garbling") then made this workaround a compile-time
conditional, to work around a missing feature in QEMU that caused the
use of "fxsave" and "fxrstor" to fail in QEMU VMs on some host CPUs.

Commit 900f1f9 ("[librm] Test for FXSAVE/FXRSTOR instruction support")
then added a runtime CPUID check for the FXSR feature, to allow the
unmodified iPXE binary to be used on older CPUs.

Supporting AES hardware acceleration via AES-NI will require setting
the CR4.OSFXSR control bit, which in turn must be conditionalised upon
the same runtime CPUID check for the FXSR feature.

Perform the runtime check unconditionally, and assume that we no
longer need the compile-time conditional (i.e. assume either that
newer versions of QEMU emulate "fxsave" and "fxrstor" when needed, or
that QEMU reports via CPUID that FXSR is not supported if it cannot
support those instructions).

Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>
3 files changed
tree: 2d1f814f423aede2f1f6c2437137f5c842d3989a
  1. .claude/
  2. .github/
  3. contrib/
  4. src/
  5. AGENTS.md
  6. CHANGELOG.md
  7. CLAUDE.md
  8. CONTRIBUTING.md
  9. COPYING
  10. COPYING.GPLv2
  11. COPYING.UBDL
  12. README.md
  13. RELEASE.md
  14. RELNOTES.tmpl.md
  15. SECURITY.md
README.md

iPXE network bootloader

Build Coverity Release

iPXE is the leading open source network boot firmware. It provides a full PXE implementation enhanced with additional features such as:

  • boot from a web server via HTTP or HTTPS,

  • boot from an iSCSI, FCoE, or AoE SAN,

  • control the boot process with a script,

  • create interactive forms and menus.

You can use iPXE to replace the existing PXE ROM on your network card, or you can chainload into iPXE to obtain the features of iPXE without the hassle of reflashing.

iPXE is free, open-source software licensed under the GNU GPL (with some portions under GPL-compatible licences).

You can download the rolling release binaries (built from the latest commit), or use the most recent stable release.

For full documentation, visit the iPXE website.