Simplevisor: Intel x64 Windows-specific hypervisor

http://ionescu007.github.io/SimpleVisor/

by transpute • 10 years ago

178 24 10 years ago

ionescu007.github.io

speeder• 10 years ago

Can someone explain to me what this is for? The article explicitly mentions that it is not intended to emulate a machine like bochs/vmware or running windows on linux...

So what is this for? Everyone I talked about this subject or use it to run windows apps on *nix ( osx included ) or to create multiple servers in a single machine. What else a hypervisor can do?

EDIT: for the people pointing me the motivation section... well, that is the section I am quoting in first place.

I did read it, but the guy is awfully vague.

And I never used a hypervisor before anyway, thus you can't assume I will understand random jargon.

martius• 10 years ago

There is a comprehensive "motivation" section on the linked page of the project.

givinguflac• 10 years ago

From the motivation section:

Too many hypervisor projects out there are either extremely complicated (Xen, KVM, VirtualBox) and/or closed-source (VMware, Hyper-V), as well as heavily focused toward Linux-based development or system. Additionally, most (other than Hyper-V) of them are expressly built for the purpose of enabling the execution of virtual machines, and not the virtualization of a live, running system, in order to perform introspection or other security-related tasks on it.

chocolatebunny• 10 years ago

What exactly falls under the "other security-related tasks" section? The only thing I can think of would be for a privileged application to try and hide things from the OS.

ed_blackburn• 10 years ago

Wow. Labour of love? Can't say I've ever had the motivation to delve into writing a hyper visor but for anyone else who is interested what a superb reference!

0x0• 10 years ago

Sounds a lot like the underappreciated and only lightly documented OSX "hypervisor.framework"

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Driver...

duaneb2• 10 years ago

Why do you call it "underappreciated"?

Razengan3• 10 years ago

Probably because OS X is full of cool tech that seems to be weakly documented, underexposed (in terms of API, like the built-in dictionary) or underutilized (because most developers or users aren't always aware of it.)

I really appreciate that Apple doesn't just keep dropping less used features after just 1 OS release like Microsoft does, but I really wish they overhauled their documentation and improved the discoverability of the cool stuff.

capitalisthakr• 10 years ago

Docker for OS X is using this, so not really that underappreciated.

LeoPanthera• 10 years ago

"Veertu" is a VMware/Parallels competitor that uses this: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/veertu-native-virtualization...

But as far as I know it doesn't support attaching to USB devices so I'm still stuck with VirtualBox.

Edit: There's also xhyve: https://github.com/mist64/xhyve which is a port of FreeBSD's bhyve.

dman2• 10 years ago

Any recommended project of the same complexity that works on linux?

4ad• 10 years ago

Lguest: http://lguest.ozlabs.org. It's in the linux kernel.

dman2• 10 years ago

Thanks!

hilmipilmi• 10 years ago

One that seems reasonably simple is: https://lwn.net/Articles/578295/

coverband• 10 years ago

Question: I see "x86 versions of Windows are expressly not supported", but does it allow for executing x86 VMs within the hypervisor?

joombaga• 10 years ago

"to support dynamic hyperjacking and unhyperjacking (that is, virtualizing the host state from within the host)."

What? Hyperjacking is a malicious attack against a hypervisor, right? Why is this a design goal? Am I missing something?

simcop2387• 10 years ago

Based on my minimal understanding of what it's doing and it's code; It's turning on virtualization, setting up a minimal environment, and then taking the current OS and "moving" it to the virtualized environment. The purpose of doing this in this case is to show how to do it in a minimal fashion, and give it as a jumping off point to create other projects with. Some things that come to mind is a debugger that can't be detected, an easier way to debug a device driver since you could set the hypervisor to log communications with the device somewhere. Or to reverse engineer software that detects normal debuggers being attached and determine what it's actually doing (this is common in malware research I believe).

Simplevisor: Intel x64 Windows-specific hypervisor

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