Detecting the Hypervisor and its Features
Guest software interacts with the hypervisor through a variety of mechanisms. Many of these mechanisms mirror the traditional mechanisms that software uses to interact with the underlying processor. Therefore, these mechanisms are architecture-specific. The x64 architecture uses the following mechanisms:
- CPUID instructions
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Used for static feature and version information.
- Model-specific registers (MSRs)
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Used for status and control values.
- Memory-mapped registers
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Used for status and control values.
- Processor interrupts
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Used for asynchronous events, notifications, and messages.
In addition to the preceding architecture-specific mechanisms, the hypervisor provides the hypercall interface. A guest operating system makes hypercalls to interact with the hypervisor. For more information about the hypercall mechanism, see Hypercall Interface.
The following sections describe how the hypervisor and its features are detected:
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Build date: 11/16/2013