The Mysterious Behavior of the Intel E-cores
Summary
It’s particularly noticeable on heterogeneous targets that support the two different types of cores, such as on the AAEON UP Xtreme i12 Alder Lake board. Building on the work from my earlier blog, VT-rp, HLAT, and my AAEON Alder Lake Core i7-1270PE board: Part 3, the sequence of 46 VM launches yields the following profile: You’ll probably have to expand the image in order to see it clearer. But, in a nutshell, here are the highlights of the boot process as it relates to VMX behavior: The first VM Launch lands in hvix64 (the Windows hypervisor) on P8, the first P-core, which is the boostrap processor (BSP). One other thing: this strange behavior is not related to SourcePoint’s almost magical ability to otherwise read Host state memory while in Guest mode. Note that to get this to work, SourcePoint has to clear the Intel Processor Trace Conceal bits upon the first VM entry into Host mode (thank you, Windows, for the mitigation).
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