1 Hypercall ABI

Hypercalls are system calls to Xen. Two modes of guest operation are supported, and up to 6 individual parameters are supported.

Hypercalls may only be issued by kernel-level software¹.

1.1 Registers

The registers used for hypercalls depends on the operating mode of the guest.

32 and 64bit PV guests have an ABI fixed by their guest type. The ABI for an HVM guest depends on whether the vCPU is operating in a 64bit segment or not ².

1.2 Parameters

Different hypercalls take a different number of parameters. Each hypercall potentially clobbers each of its parameter registers; a guest may not rely on the parameter registers staying the same. A debug build of Xen checks this by deliberately poisoning the parameter registers before returning back to the guest.

1.3 Mode transfer

The exact sequence of instructions required to issue a hypercall differs between virtualisation mode and hardware vendor.

To abstract away the details, Xen implements an interface known as the Hypercall Page. This allows a guest to make a hypercall without needing to perform mode-specific or vendor-specific setup.

2 Hypercall Page

The hypercall page is a page of guest RAM into which Xen will write suitable transfer stubs.

Creating a hypercall page is an isolated operation from Xen's point of view. It is the guests responsibility to ensure that the hypercall page, once written by Xen, is mapped with executable permissions so it may be used. Multiple hypercall pages may be created by the guest, if it wishes.

The stubs are arranged by hypercall index, and start on 32-byte boundaries. To invoke a specific hypercall, call the relevant stub³:

call hypercall_page + index * 32

There result is an ABI which is invariant of the exact operating mode or hardware vendor. This is intended to simplify guest kernel interfaces by abstracting away the details of how it is currently running.

2.1 Creating Hypercall Pages

Guests which are started using the PV boot protocol may set set XEN_ELFNOTE_HYPERCALL_PAGE to have the nominated page written as a hypercall page during construction. This mechanism is common for PV guests, and allows hypercalls to be issued with no additional setup.

Any guest can locate the Xen CPUID leaves and read the hypercall transfer page information, which specifies an MSR that can be used to create additional hypercall pages. When a guest physical address is written to the MSR, Xen writes a hypercall page into the nominated guest page. This mechanism is common for HVM guests which are typically started via legacy means.

Footnotes