Introduction If you’ve ever had experience with developing your own hypervisor from scratch then you definitely faced with the problems of layout checking. What makes it hard to develop a hypervisor is the fact that Intel has a small number of errors for a huge checklist described in [CHAPTER 26] VM ENTRIES from Intel’s 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual including: 26.2 CHECKS ON VMX CONTROLS AND HOST-STATE AREA 26.3 CHECKING AND LOADING GUEST STATE 26.4 LOADING MSRS 26.5 EVENT…
Hi everyone! In this post I’m going to introduce you to the world of linux kernel module development. I am a newcomer in this field myself but I decided to document everything in this blog as I gradually learn them. To start you need some sort of virtual machine. Of course you can test kernel modules on your own system but it is very risky and you can’t really debug them effectively and must use printk and debug messages to…
Hello guys! Welcome to the fourth part of the “Hypervisor From Scratch”. This part is primarily about translating guest address through Extended Page Table (EPT) and its implementation. We also see how shadow tables work and other cool stuff. First of all, make sure to read the earlier parts before reading this topic as these parts are really dependent on each other also you should have a basic understanding of paging mechanism and how page tables work. A good article is…
Introduction This is the third part of the tutorial “Hypervisor From Scratch“. You may have noticed that the previous parts have steadily been getting more complicated. This part should teach you how to get started with creating your own VMM, we go to demonstrate how to interact with the VMM from Windows User-mode (IOCTL Dispatcher), then we solve the problems with the affinity and running code in a special core. Finally, we get familiar with initializing VMXON Regions and VMCS…
Introduction MONITOR and MWAIT are using when the CPU needs to be stopped executing the instruction and enter an implementation-dependent optimized state until some special event happens. MONITOR sets up an address range used to monitor write-back stores while MWAIT enables a logical processor to enter into an optimized state while waiting for a write-back store to the address range set up by MONITOR instruction. MWAIT and MONITOR may be executed only at privilege level 0, if you use these…