Model Specific Registers

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.

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.

See Also

Articles

• CPUID
• CPU Registers x86
• CPU Registers x86-64

External Links

• http://sandpile.org/x86/msr.htm for documented MSRs
• https://github.com/xen-project/xen/blob/master/xen/include/asm-x86/msr-index.h for MSRs relevant to Xen emulation (including Intel's 0x35)