alt Hacker News> instead of trapping to the hypervisor
My bad! I mean, ehh, I guess you could maintain a breakpoint in the guest kernel's exception vector table or have QEMU inject its own "zero-level exception handler" whose only purpose would be to capture those HVCs, but that's not as straightforward as I originally thought. And since those PAC calls are expected to set a few Apple-specific registers anyway, using the entitlement or skipping Hypervisor.framework and talking straight to the kernel seem like the only viable options when macOS is the guest.
> There are some nightmare cases that SEPOS specifically triggers, such as doing isv=0 accesses to GICR... when using the Apple vGIC handling _that_ becomes truly bizarre.
Interesting! Are there any resources out there about virtualizing sepOS?
Not much public yet about VRE virtualisation (which includes SEP) at this point.
> whose only purpose would be to capture those HVCs
quite expensive because you get to trap ~ all EL0 -> EL1 priv transitions through the virtualisation infrastructure as the sync handler has a lot going through it