[vbox-dev] Accessing guest memory from the vBox host

[Sander van Leeuwen]

  On 8/19/2010 9:26 PM, Glenn Tremblay wrote:
>
> Sander -- thank you for the prompt response. My follow up is below.
>
> > Two options:
>
> > 1) create a virtual device that reads and writes from/to guest memory;
>
> > you can map guest memory into host memory, but that is generally 
> discouraged
>
> Our plans are to run a single guest per vbox instance -- so guest 
> security is not as much of an issue.
>
> I'd like to know what calls I would need to map (and nmap) a guest 
> [physical?] address into host address space?
>
The pfnPhysGCPhys2CCPtr(ReadOnly) PDM helper should be used to get the 
host virtual address of a guest physical page. If you just need the 
mapping to copy the contents,
then you can also use read/write functions for access GC virtual or 
physical memory.

> > 2) create a virtual device that maps an associated MMIO range into guest
>
> > memory (our VGA device does that)
>
> So the associated MMIO memory would be allocated by the host and 
> associated with the PCI device I create? And the guest would have to 
> copy its I/O buffer data to/from this region? With this approach there 
> is a lot of copy overhead. Due to our isolated environment I'd prefer 
> to temporarily map each guest I/O buffer (which is in our own 
> proprietary format) so the host can access it for the duration of the 
> I/O operation. Is this feasible? How expensive are the 
> mapping/unmapping operations?
>
They are fairly cheap. Especially on 64-bit hosts as we map the entire 
guest physical ram into the address space of the VM process. On 32-bit 
hosts you can trigger expensive mapping operations; not with the current 
releases, but with the next major release.



-- 
Kind regards / Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Met vriendelijke groet

--
Sander van Leeuwen | Senior Staff Engineer, VirtualBox
Oracle Virtualization

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