Monitor Trap Flag (MTF) Usage in EPT-based Guest Physical Memory Monitoring

Monitor Trap Flag (MTF) is a flag specifically designed for single-stepping in x86/Intel hardware virtualization VT-x technology. When MTF is set, the guest will trigger a VM Exit after executing each instruction (need to consider NMI or other interrupt delivery boundary). This paper presents an idea to use MTF for memory write allowing when monitoring modification to guest virtual-to-physical mapping (page table entries) tables. 

Enable UEFI Firmware BIOS and Debug Xen/EFI on VMware Player

Since VMware product (e.g. Player) now supports nested virtualization VT-x/VMX , recently I wanted to use this feature to debug XEN w/ EFI on top of VMware Player. This post details some best practices, and some issues I encountered.