Virtual machine manager for address mapping and translation protection

• Main Authors: Neiger, Gilbert, Anderson, Andrew V, Koufaty, David A, Cihula, Joseph F, Sahita, Ravi L, Durham, David M, Thiyagarajah, Arumugam, Mallick, Asit K, Gupta, Deepak K, Shanbhogue, Vedvyas, Lemay, Michael, Patel, Baiju V, Huntley, Barry E
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 10.12.2019
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS

This disclosure is directed to a system for address mapping and translation protection. In one embodiment, processing circuitry may include a virtual machine manager (VMM) to control specific guest linear address (GLA) translations. Control may be implemented in a performance sensitive and secure manner, and may be capable of improving performance for critical linear address page walks over legacy operation by removing some or all of the cost of page walking extended page tables (EPTs) for critical mappings. Alone or in combination with the above, certain portions of a page table structure may be selectively made immutable by a VMM or early boot process using a sub-page policy (SPP). For example, SPP may enable non-volatile kernel and/or user space code and data virtual-to-physical memory mappings to be made immutable (e.g., non-writable) while allowing for modifications to non-protected portions of the OS paging structures and particularly the user space.