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Re: VMWare ESXi 6.5 U2 Intelk RDRAND/RDSEED instruction behavior

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Your CPU is a Broadwell CPU so it should have both RDRAND and RDSEED.

 

Look at the vmware.log for these (the samples below is from VMware Player 15.0.2 with a Skylake i7-6700HQ).

 

vmx| I125:   RDRAND exiting                           {0,1}

vmx| I125:   RDSEED exiting                           {0,1}

 

vmx| I125: VM Features Required: cpuid.rdrand - Bool:Min:1

vmx| I125: VM Features Required: cpuid.rdseed - Bool:Min:1

 

The exiting determines whether a VMexit happens whenever the instruction is executed.

 

You want to make sure that the virtual hardware version is set to 13 (highest possible for ESXi 6.5) and that it does not have any EVC masks. The hardware compatibility can act as a CPU mask and masking out CPU features (e.g. version 10 or lower masks out Haswell features).

 

I don't think the hypervisor overrides with its own implementation as that would be a form of binary translation.

 

So if RDRAND and RDSEED instructions are not available inside the VM and it invokes them, it should cause an error rather than the hypervisor deciding what to do with it; just as some VM appliances require AES-NI and the host CPU does not have AES-NI it fails rather than ESXi trying to replace it with its own implementation.


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