Hypervisor Internals

Purpose

Explain hardware virtualization internals for agents: Intel VT-x (VMXON, VMCS, VMLAUNCH/VMRESUME, VMEXIT reasons), AMD SVM (VMCB, #VMEXIT), Extended/Nested Page Tables (EPT/NPT), APIC virtualization, MSR bitmaps, virtual interrupt injection, and references for building minimal type-1 hypervisors.

When to Use

• Understanding how KVM, Hyper-V, or VMware map to hardware features
• Debugging VMEXIT storms or EPT violations
• Studying hypervisor security research (CVE triage)
• Building educational hypervisors (SimpleVisor, hvpp)
• Tuning nested virtualization performance
• Analyzing VM escape or side-channel mitigations

Workflow

1. Virtualization types