A virtual machine doesn’t exit when it’s comfortable. It exits when it encounters a disaster it can’t understand.
Lin Tao knelt amidst the collapsing ruins of the quarantine cage, the air whistling out of the cracks in the skybox into the freezing empty pocket of space. The violet wipe-out fire had burned up three of the four walls. That left only the jagged, pixelated northwestern corner standing.
Four seconds.
The final seconds of the guest container’s existence unfolded with painful, ice-slow slowness.
Lin Tao stood upon the narrow, four-foot ledge of surviving white shape, the only solid matter leftover in the entire one-hundred-meter cube. Below him, above him, and to all sides lay the terrifying, unrendered void. A pitch-black infinity where no stars shone and no light traveled.
In modern systems stonework, when a virtual machine suffered an unhandled software exception, the guest running system tried to execute an internal recovery routine. If that recovery routine also faulted, the processor raised a Double Fault.
And if the Double Fault handler itself met an unmapped address or an invalid stack pointer, the processor had nowhere left to turn.
It triggered a Triple Fault.
