However, hardware context switching is no longer supported in 64-bit mode and the format of the TSS changed completely.
Quite unfortunate, especially with the large state sizes of processors now with all their vector registers and such; it would've been great to simply ask the hardware how much it needs, allocate a TSS of the appropriate size, and it would automatically manage the state save/restore as necessary.
Fun fact: in the days of the 286, which could not switch out of protected mode without a reset, the fastest way was to triple-fault:
Hardware context switching is quite fast and overhead free.
The problem is that commonly the hardware based switch will not save all registers and with software based switching you can be much more selective about what you do and eek out a bit more performance that way.
Because the hardware mechanism saves almost all of the CPU state it can be slower than is necessary. For example, when the CPU loads new segment registers it does all of the access and permission checks that are involved. As most modern operating systems don't use segmentation, loading the segment registers during context switches may be not be required, so for performance reasons these operating systems tend not to use the hardware context switching mechanism. Due to it not being used as much CPU manufacturers don't optimize CPUs for this method anymore (AFAIK). In addition the new 64 bit CPU's do not support hardware context switches when in 64 bit/long mode."
In general, an infinite stream of page faults is not that uncommon if you mess up the page tables. The IST won't help you there...
That's an advantage of the POWER feature where you can define a small number of (typically very large, but that doesn't have to be the case) linear mappings that bypass the page tables. It's typically used to speed up TLB misses, but you could for example add one for the double fault IST if x86 had a similar thing.
Quite unfortunate, especially with the large state sizes of processors now with all their vector registers and such; it would've been great to simply ask the hardware how much it needs, allocate a TSS of the appropriate size, and it would automatically manage the state save/restore as necessary.
Fun fact: in the days of the 286, which could not switch out of protected mode without a reset, the fastest way was to triple-fault:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/08/fa...