First Post!

Woo! So yeah, I decided to create a simple little blog for my adventures and discoveries as I write my Simple Windows Virtualization Layer (SWiVL) driver. Just a fair warning; this will be a more technical blog, with possible code snippets, so unless you're familiar with C/Windows driver programming, many of my posts may not make much sense.

Just as a little background about myself, I'm currently an undergraduate student at RPI, junior year, studying Computer Science. I've been programming for about 10 years now, ever since I got a Lego® Mindstorms® set for Christmas. I've most of my experience in C, C++, C♯, Java, Lua, and x86 assembly.

Anyway, onto the driver itself! The current goal of SWiVL is to provide user-mode Win32 applications a basic interface to the VMX (and possibly SVM in the future) virtualization extensions for x64-based CPUs, in much the same way KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) does for Linux. The project will actually be split into two different drivers; the basic hypervisor, which initializes VMX on all currently active CPUs and creates virtual machine objects, and the VM function driver, which manages a single VM instance. Both drivers will provide a simple IOCTL interface which will be used by a simple user-mode library. For now, the user-mode library will just provide simple wrappers around DeviceIoControl calls, but I do plan on possibly adding C++ classes for a more object-oriented approach to VM management.

If anyone's interested, I may post snippets of code as well as explanation behind them (and would certainly be open to any feedback; always looking for better approaches).

Bit of a long first post, but it was mostly to introduce myself and the project, and explain the current goals. I have no idea how often I'll be posting, or how long future posts will be, but I'll try to keep the blog updated whenever I make good progress. Stay tuned!