.\" Copyright (c) 2009 Intel Corporation, Author Andi Kleen
.\" Some sentences copied from comments in arch/x86/kernel/msr.c
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.TH MSR 4 2009-03-31 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
msr \- x86 CPU MSR access device
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I /dev/cpu/CPUNUM/msr
provides an interface to read and write the model-specific
registers (MSRs) of an x86 CPU.
.I CPUNUM
is the number of the CPU to access as listed in
.IR /proc/cpuinfo .

The register access is done by opening the file and seeking
to the MSR number as offset in the file, and then
reading or writing in chunks of 8 bytes.
An I/O transfer of more than 8 bytes means multiple reads or writes
of the same register.

This file is protected so that it can only be read and written by the user
.IR root ,
or members of the group
.IR root .
.SH NOTES
The
.I msr
driver is not auto-loaded.
On modular kernels you might need to use the following command
to load it explicitly before use:

    $ \fImodprobe msr\fP
.SH SEE ALSO
Intel Corporation Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures
Software Developer's Manual Volume 3B Appendix B
for an overview of the Intel CPU MSRs.
.SH COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.22 of the Linux
.I man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
