XSAVE consistency problem for RHEL 8.x VM on ESXi 7.0 with a Skylake CPU

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Booting RHEL 8.x VM on ESXi 7.0 with a Skylake CPU, XSAVE consistency problem error is reported in the dmesg log of the VM.

[ 0.000000] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[ 0.000000] XSAVE consistency problem, dumping leaves
[ 0.000000] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 0 at arch/x86/kernel/fpu/xstate.c:614 do_extra_xstate_size_checks+0x2f3/0x3de
[ 0.000000] Modules linked in:
[ 0.000000] CPU: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper Not tainted 4.18.0-193.el8.x86_64 #1
[ 0.000000] RIP: 0010:do_extra_xstate_size_checks+0x2f3/0x3de
[ 0.000000] Code: ff 44 3b 25 e5 93 b8 01 0f 84 d9 00 00 00 80 3d d9 96 39 01 00 75 27 48 c7 c7 f0 d1 47 bb c6 05 c9 96 39 01 01 e8 65 3e 08 00 <0f> 0b eb 10 83 3d a0 50 1f 01 00 74 23 e8 4a fc ff ff eb 1c 83 3d
[ 0.000000] RSP: 0000:ffffffffbb603da8 EFLAGS: 00010086 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000000
[ 0.000000] RAX: 0000000000000000 RBX: 000000000000000a RCX: 0000000000000029
[ 0.000000] RDX: 0000000000000009 RSI: ffffffffbc01af40 RDI: 0000000000000046
[ 0.000000] RBP: 0000000000000008 R08: 657661656c20676e R09: 73657661656c2067
[ 0.000000] R10: 656c626f72702079 R11: 69706d7564202c6d R12: 0000000000000988
[ 0.000000] R13: ffffffffbb603db0 R14: ffffffffbb603dac R15: ffffffffbb603da8
[ 0.000000] FS: 0000000000000000(0000) GS:ffffffffbbd4b000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
[ 0.000000] CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
[ 0.000000] CR2: ffff888000094810 CR3: 0000000091dee000 CR4: 00000000000406a0
[ 0.000000] Call Trace:
[ 0.000000] ? do_clear_cpu_cap+0xf4/0x110
[ 0.000000] ? fpu__init_system_xstate+0x179/0x458
[ 0.000000] ? 0xffffffffba400000
[ 0.000000] ? fpu__init_system+0x208/0x234
[ 0.000000] ? early_init_intel+0x150/0x370
[ 0.000000] ? 0xffffffffba400000
[ 0.000000] ? x86_match_cpu+0x5/0xa0
[ 0.000000] ? early_cpu_init+0x2ae/0x2cb
[ 0.000000] ? setup_arch+0xe0/0x101a
[ 0.000000] ? printk+0x58/0x6f
[ 0.000000] ? start_kernel+0x63/0x55b
[ 0.000000] ? x86_family+0x5/0x20
[ 0.000000] ? load_ucode_bsp+0x42/0x12e
[ 0.000000] ? secondary_startup_64+0xb7/0xc0
[ 0.000000] random: get_random_bytes called from print_oops_end_marker+0x26/0x40 with crng_init=0
[ 0.000000] ---[ end trace 009e620edbd0a5f1 ]---

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0

Cause

You can see this message when the set of xsave features exposed to the virtual machine is a subset of the xsave features support by the host. In such cases, the size of the xsave region enumerated in CPUID may be larger than expected.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in VMware ESXi 7.0 U1, available at VMware Downloads.

Note: This message is an advisory from the Linux kernel.