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Comment by eddd-ddde | Hacker News Reader

Where could someone get started in terms of reading material to learn more about this in depth?

From a different direction, I'd suggest https://www.devever.net/~hl/kvm

I would assume sooner or later you're going to end up in the Intel Developer manuals or the equivalent for whatever architecture you are interested in. The Intel ones are very complete at least.

> I would assume sooner or later you're going to end up in the Intel Developer manuals or the equivalent for whatever architecture you are interested in. The Intel ones are very complete at least.

I can vouch for this. I'm no virtualization expert but I did stumble upon some intel developers manuals (truthfully, i fell into the rabbit hole) and just skimming it made everything make much more sense.

For example: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... - "CHAPTER 23 INTRODUCTION TO VIRTUAL MACHINE EXTENSIONS"

The link above explains how the VMX extension work on intel processors. Any software doing hardware-assisted virtualization (so no binary translation, no full-system-emulation) will likely be using those instructions.

The AMD Processor Programming Reference manuals are also good for this, if you like complete and detailed. They complement the Intel manuals. Much the material is duplicate because the processors are so similar, but written in a different way.

if you want to look at existing implementations on top of kvm then these might be useful - rust-vmm is a core library for AWS' firecracker vmm.

https://github.com/rust-vmm/kvm https://github.com/kvmtool/kvmtool https://github.com/sysprog21/kvm-host

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