Abort Indicator in the VMCS

[vishwa_m]

I was playing around with a small DOS program that goes through vmlaunch -> vmcall (vmexit) -> vmxoff sequence. I got that working but noticed after vmexit that the abort-indicator in the vmcs was 1 (offset 0x4). Upon some debug, I realized that when i initialized the vmcs-revision-id (offset 0) , I also wrote a 1 to the next dword. The question I have is if the processor should clear the abort-indicator field at the end of vmexit (if the vmexit did not cause an abort)?

[David_O_Intel1]

Here are some comments from a team member:

As per the Software Development Manual, theVMM should clear it.

The next 32 bits of the VMCS region are used for the VMX-abort indicator. The contents of these bits do not control processor operation in any way. A logical processor writes a non-zero value into these bits if a VMX abort occurs (see Section 23.7). Software may also write into this field.