Programmatically detect if hardware virtualization is enabled on Windows 7

Question

Background

I've been bouncing around this for a while and still haven't come up with an adequate solution, hoping someone out there can point me in the right direction.

Essentially I need to identify whether I can run 64bit VM on a target machine (working in GO but happy to consider binding c code or some assembly (though I feel a bit out of depth there)

In order to run a 64 bit VM the system need Hardware Virtualisation support available and enabled in the bios (im only concerned with intel/amd at this time)

Journey so far

From windows 8 onwards, Windows ships with Hyper-V, and there is a nice function you can call IsProcessorFeaturePresent from the kernel32.dll with an arg of 'PF_VIRT_FIRMWARE_ENABLED' which will tell you if hardware virtualisation is enabled in firmware:

IsProcessorFeaturePresent

now I dont really like the way this behaves (it says not available if hyper-v is installed) but i can cope with it by checking if hyper-v is enabled through other means so this pretty much does the job from win8 upwards.

Problem is this function always return false on win 7 for some reason - even on a system on which I know hardware virtualization is enabled.

Coming from another angle I have used this lib to determine what instruction sets are available: intel processor feature lib - this allows me to know what type of virtualization instructions are available on the processor (if any)

But I'm still missing the final piece of knowing if its enabled in the bios on win 7. I figure in principle it should be easy from here - I should be able to call something which utilizes the virtualization extensions and see if it responds as expected. But unfortunately I have no idea how to do this.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might do this?

Note: Im happy to consider 3rd party libs but this would be used in commercial software so licensing would have to allow for that (e.g nothing from Microsoft)

Answer 1

I am afraid you won't be able to achieve what you want unless you are ready to provide a kernel driver, because checking if BIOS has enabled virtualization requires kernel privileges.

Intel Software Developer Manual describes a model-specific register (MSR) with number 3Ah called IA32_FEATURE_CONTROL. Its bits 1 and 2 control whether VMX instructions are allowed in SMX and non-SMX modes. Also there is bit zero which, when written with 1, locks the whole register's value, thus making impossible to enable/disabled features until the next processor reset. This means that, if BIOS code has disabled VMX and locked it, an OS that boots later will be unable to change that fact, only to see it.

To read this or any other MSR one should use machine instruction RDMSR, and this instruction is only available when CPL is zero, that is, within an OS context. It will throw an exception if attempted to be used from application code.

Unless you find a program interface method that wraps RDMSR around and provides it to applications, you are out of luck. Typically that implies loading and running a dedicated kernel driver. I am aware about one for Linux, but cannot say if there is anything for Windows.

As an extra note, if your code is already running inside a virtual machine, like it is for some Windows installations which enable a Hyper-V environment for regular desktop, then you won't even be able to see an actual host MSR value. It will be up to the VMM to provide you with an emulated value, as well as it will show you whatever CPUID value it wants you to see, not the one from the host.