Model Specific Registers

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Processors from the P6 family onwards (including PentiumPro, Pentium II, III, 4 and Intel Core) have a collection of registers that allow configuration of OS-relevant things such as memory type-range, sysenter/sysexit, local APIC, etc. These MSRs are accessed using special instructions such as RDMSR (Read MSR), WRMSR (Write MSR), and RDTSC.

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Accessing Model Specific Registers

Each MSR that is accessed by the RDMSR and WRMSR group of instructions is identified by a 32-bit integer. MSRs are 64-bit wide. The presence of MSRs on your processor is indicated by CPUID.01h:EDX[bit 5].

const uint32_t CPUID_FLAG_MSR = 1 << 5;
 
bool cpuHasMSR()
{
   static uint32_t a, d; // eax, edx
   cpuid(1, &a, &d);
   return d & CPUID_FLAG_MSR;
}
 
void cpuGetMSR(uint32_t msr, uint32_t *lo, uint32_t *hi)
{
   asm volatile("rdmsr" : "=a"(*lo), "=d"(*hi) : "c"(msr));
}
 
void cpuSetMSR(uint32_t msr, uint32_t lo, uint32_t hi)
{
   asm volatile("wrmsr" : : "a"(lo), "d"(hi), "c"(msr));
}

Other way to access MSRs

rdmsr and wrmsr are privileged instructions. However, there are a few MSRs that can be accessed from non-privileged code using special instructions. For example, the rdtsc instruction is a non-privileged instruction that reads the timestamp counter, which is actually situated in an MSR (index 10h).

Additional x86_64 Registers

AMD added the EFER register for controlling specific long mode features. It has since been adopted by Intel.

Bit 0 System Call Extensions (SCE)
Bits 1-7 Reserved
Bit 8 Long Mode Enable (LME)
Bit 9 Reserved
Bit 10 Long Mode Active (LMA)
Bit 11 No-Execute Enable (NXE)
Bit 12 Secure Virtual Machine Enable (SVME)
Bit 13 Long Mode Segment Limit Enable (LMSLE)
Bit 14 fast FXSAVE/FXSTOR (FFXSR)
Bit 15 Translation Cache Extension (TCE)
Bits 16-63 Reserved

The by far most interesting is the SCE Bit, as it enables the syscall instruction.

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