VMX

This page is a stub.

You can help the wiki by accurately adding more contents to it.

Intel's Virtual-Machine Extensions

Programming

Discovering support

After enumerating the features from CPUID, bit 5 in ECX will tell you if VMX is supported or not. This is the first thing that should be checked!

Basic environment

Software should enable bit 13 of CR4 (CR4.VMXE) first. Here are a few definitions of some used MSR's that we'll be dealing with:

#define IA32_VMX_BASIC          0x480
#define IA32_VMX_CR0_FIXED0     0x486
#define IA32_VMX_CR0_FIXED1     0x487
#define IA32_VMX_CR4_FIXED0     0x488
#define IA32_VMX_CR4_FIXED1     0x489

In order to see what your OS needs to support, you need to read the lower 32-bits of IA32_VMX_CR0_FIXED0 and IA32_VMX_CR4_FIXED0. The bits in those MSR's are what need to be set (and supported) in their corresponding control registers (CR0/CR4). If any of those bits are not enabled, a GPF will occur. Also, to see what extra bits can be set, check the IA32_VMX_CR0_FIXED1 and IA32_VMX_CR4_FIXED1. It's basically a mask of bits, if a bit is set to 1, then it "can" be enabled, but if it's a 0, you may generate an exception if you enable the corresponding bit in the control registers.

From my own hardware and emulator (bochs), I've found that you will most likely need to enable these bits: CR0.NE, CR4.PAE, CR0.PG and CR0.PE. Yes, that means you need to support PAE-enabled paging and have those structures installed into CR3. For 64-bit kernels, you need to have IA32_EFER.LMA set.

Executing VMXON

The main entry point for using VMX is through the VMXON instruction. The instruction requires a single operand of a m64 region called the VMXON region. The memory region needs to be 4096-byte aligned (bits 0-11 must be 0) and the only VMCS field that should be modified is the VMCS revision identification field. This ID field should contain the value in bits 0-31 of MSR IA32_VMX_BASIC. In order to prepare a memory address in 32-bit PMode for use as an m64, some modifications need to be made. The upper 32-bits of the m64 have to be 0 or an "invalid memory address" error will occur and a VMEXIT will be called.

uint32_t * region = (uint32_t *)allocate_4k_aligned(4096);
uint64_t region64 = (uint64_t)((size_t)(region) & 0xFFFFFFFF);
asm volatile("  vmxon %0; "::"m" (region64));

This general process of taking a 32-bit memory address and turning it into a psuedo-64bit int (unsigned long long) will be used for all m64 operands later. VMCLEAR is another example instruction that requires the upper 32-bits of a memory address to be 0.

Long mode simply requires a 64-bit pointer to the region.

Note: The VMXON, VMCLEAR and VMPTRLD instruction must point to the physical address of their respective regions.

VMX instruction error checking

VMX instructions have their own error reporting mechanism to indicate the success or failure of a given operation.

There are two flags used to signify the success or failure of a VM instruction. The carry flag(CF) and the zero flag(ZF).

If both of these flags are clear after a VM instruction was executed then it succeeded.

If the carry flag is set then current VMCS pointer is invalid.

If the zero flag is set, it indicates that the VMCS pointer is valid but there is some other error specified in the VM-instruction error field (encoding 4400h). Error numbers are listed in section 5.4 of the Intel SDM Volume 2B.

VMCS

The VMCS only has two relevant fields that can be accessed at this time, a 4-byte VMCS revision ID located at byte offset 0 and a 4-byte abort indicator field located at byte offset 4. The rest of the VMCS is reserved for field data.

The revision field must be filled with the 32-bit revision Id stored in bits 0-31 of the IA32_VMX_BASIC MSR similar to the VMX region.

The abort field will simply contain a non-zero value if the VM abort occurs during a VMX exit, see section 23.7 in Intel's SDM 3B for error values.

A VMCS is loaded with the VMPTRLD instruction, which loads and activates a VMCS, and requires a 64-bit memory address as it's operand in the same format as VMXON/VMCLEAR.

asm volatile ("vmptrld %0; ":: "m" (vmcsRegion64));

The structure of the VMCS is covered in detail in Chapter 20 of the Intel SDM volume 3B (see link below). Field encodings for VMWRITE and VMREAD are covered in Appendix H of the same manual.

References

Intel's SDM 3B: http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/manual/253669.pdf

Intel's SDM 2B: http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/manual/253667.pdf

KVM's VMX.c (GPLv2): http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c

BOCHS's VMX.c (LGPLv2): http://bochs.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bochs/bochs/cpu/vmx.cc