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4.9 KiB
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70 lines
4.9 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 31
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Title: HPR0031: Intel Virtualization Technology
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0031/hpr0031.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:28:27
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---
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Then you can go.
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Oh, Ok.
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Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
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This is the MerroVinci.
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Coming to you today to discuss a little more virtualization technologies.
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Today I'd like to look at an article, if included in the link in the show notes, called
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Intel Virtualization Technology and it has a pretty large list of authors.
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The top three are Rich, Ulig, Gil Niger, and Dion Rogers.
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There's a handful of other authors involved, but they are all members of the Intel Corporation
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design team I believe and this article was a cover feature of the March 2005 IEEE,
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or of an 2005 IEEE journal featuring the new VT technology that Intel was releasing
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within their architecture within the third two-bit and 64-bit architecture.
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Basically, in a nutshell, the VT technology allows you to take virtualization and bring
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it down to the hardware level.
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When we last talked about the main two different types of virtualization, like full virtualization
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and pair of virtualization, with this VT technology, this VT technology paired with pair
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of virtualization brings the virtualization from that software controlling the hardware
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functionality and brings it down entirely to the hardware level and allows you to provide
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our two, create CPU access or allow CPU level access to the guest operating system or
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the guest virtual machine without having to emulate this technology.
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With the VT, they originally had two forms and it was the VTX and VTI.
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The VTX technology allows for two new forms of CPU operation.
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Those are broken down into VMX, root operation and VMX non-root operation and basically a
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virtual machine runs in the VMX root operation and it runs its guests in the VMX non-root
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operation.
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Both forms of this operation supports the four privileged levels or the four CPU privilege
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rings.
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Since the VMX root and the guest run in the VMX non-root, that means the guest runs
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in a technically lower or they run in a less privileged ring but to the guest operating
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system, it has its own ring structure.
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To the guest operating system, it has access to ring zero which is the most privileged
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access when in reality it's still contained within ring three or ring four and yet doesn't
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have access to ring zero except through the virtual machine monitor, the hypervisor as
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it were.
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Now this technology is absolutely incredible because now we've taken what we needed
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to do in software and what we had to worry about code escalation or code privilege to these
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access rings, I mean now there's no emulation whatsoever in the software level, it's all
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taken care of in the hardware level.
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Now the other form of Intel's virtualization technology is the VTI architecture and basically
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this is a principal hardware extension and as a addition of a new bit in the processor
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status register, so that's the PSR, I'm not very big on CPU construction architecture
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so this article might make more sense to other people but basically what the VTI architecture
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allows is that as it runs the PSR.VM bit, it's either zero or a one, zero being, as if there
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were no VMs that it has to worry about, no virtualized guests that it has to worry about
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so basically if there was no VTI technology in the chip or if that bit is signaled as a one
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which allows, which would allow privilege instructions and some non-privileged instructions
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to cause a new virtualization fault in the processor as it's working.
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Now like I said, I'm not a processor individual so I would definitely encourage you to go
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through and read through this article to maybe find more information and hopefully some of you
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all can go through this article in full, amounts of information that I did not discuss here
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because maybe quite frankly I don't understand. I would like to also include though that this
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article focuses on Intel's VTI technology. Now that's not to say other chips at manufacturers
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have not been working on their own virtualization technology. I know that AMD has their own
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VTS technology although they have their own internal name for it which I do not remember but
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ultimately this technology has allowed for massive virtualization machines to be brought down
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to the consumer prosumer level so that you can run multiple virtual machines on your own personal
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computer and yet not be any overhead in terms of processing costs for hardware costs or software
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costs because it all occurs in hardware and basically that is closer to as if you had an individual
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machine for each virtual machine monitor. This has been the MerroVinci. If you have any questions
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feel free to email me MerroVinci at Gino.com. You can usually find me lurking in the Infanamacon
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channel on the free node IRC server but this is another episode. Thank you for listening to
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the Haftler Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Carol.net so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-T for all
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