A prison cell is not defined by its walls. It’s defined by the warden’s ledger.
Lin Tao stood in the center of the chamber. His land-mapper metal pen was held ready in his bandaged right hand. The bitter pine-resin salve had numbed the ache in his forearm. The cold linen compress around his brow kept his vision sharp. In his optic display, the physical memory map of the host overseer-core remained pinned in amber glyphs.
At physical address 0x00185000, Lin Tao analyzed, lies the Virtual Machine Control Structure. In Intel VT-x and Precursor hypervisors, this four-kilobyte memory page defines the entire execution context of a guest container.
The VMCS was divided into six logical functional areas:
First, the Guest-State Area: containing the saved registers of the guest process, including RIP (Instruction Pointer), RSP (Stack Pointer), and CR3 (Guest Page Table Base).
Second, the Host-State Area: containing the overseer-core’s private registers, loaded whenever a VM-Exit occurred.
Third, the VM-Execution Control Fields: containing the security flags that dictated which instructions the guest was allowed to execute without trapping to the overseer-core.
Fourth, the VM-Exit Control Fields: governing what happens when the guest surrenders control to the host.
