Fast kernel debugging for VMware, part 5: Bridging the Gap to DbgEng.dll

The previous article in the virtualized kernel debugging series described some of the details behind how VMKD communicates with the outside world via some modifications to the VMware VMM.

Although getting from the operating system kernel to the outside world is certainly an important milestone with respect to improved virtual machine kernel debugging, it is still necessary to somehow connect the last set of dots between the modified VMware VMM and the debugger (DbgEng.dll). The debugger doesn’t really have native support for what VMKD attempts to do. Like the KD transport module code that runs in kernel mode on the target, DbgEng expects to be talking to a hardware interface (through a user mode accessible API) in order to send and receive data from the target.

There is some support in DbgEng that can be salvaged to communicate with the VMM-side portion of VMKD, which is the “native” support for debugging over named pipe (or TCP, the latter being apparently functional but completely undocumented, which is perhaps unsurprising as there’s no public server end for that as there is for named pipe kernel debugging). However, there’s a problem with using this part of DbgEng’s support for kernel debugging. Although it does allow us to easily talk to DbgEng without having to patch it (a definite plus, as patching two completely isolated programs from two different vendors is a recipe for an extremely brittle program), this support for named pipe or TCP transports for KD is not without its downsides.

Specifically, the named pipe and TCP transport logic is essentially a bolt-on, after-the-fact addition to the serial port (KDCOM) support in DbgEng. (This is why, among other things, kernel debugging over named pipe always starts with kd -k com:pipe,….) What this means in terms of VMKD is that DbgEng expects that anything that it would be speaking to over named pipe or TCP is going to be implementing the low-level KDCOM framing protocol, with the high level KD protocol running on top of that. The KDCOM framing protocol is unfortunately a fairly unwieldy and messy protocol (it is designed to work with minimal dependencies and without a reliable way of knowing whether the remote end of the serial port is even connected, much less receiving data).

Essentially, the KDCOM framing protocol is to TCP as the high level KD protocol is to, say, HTTP in terms of networking protocols. KDCOM takes care of all the low level goo with respect to retransmits, acknowledgments, and everything else about establishing and maintaining a reliable connection with the remote end of the kernel debugger connection. While KDCOM is nowhere near as complex as TCP (thankfully!), it is not without its share of nuances, and it is certainly not publicly documented. (There was originally some partial documentation of an ancient version of the KDCOM protocol released in the NT 3.51 DDK in terms of source code to a partially operational kernel debugger client, with additional aspects covered in the Windows 2000 DDK. There is unfortunately no mention at all of any of this in any recent DDKs or WDKs, as KDCOM has long since disappeared into “no longer documented land”, an irritating habit of many old kernel APIs.)

The fact that there is no way to directly inject high level KD protocol data into DbgEng (aside from patching non-exported internal routines in the debugger, which is certainly no desirable from a future compatibility standpoint) presents a rather troublesome problem. By virtue of taking the approach of replacing KdSendPacket and KdReceivePacket in the guest, the code that was formerly responsible for maintaining the server-end of the low-level KDCOM link is no longer in use. That is, the data coming out of the kernel is raw high-level KD protocol data and not KDCOM data, and yet DbgEng can only interpret KDCOM-framed data over TCP or named pipe.

The solution that I ended up developing to counteract this problem, while a logical consequence of this limitation, is nonetheless unwieldy. In order to communicate with DbgEng, VMKD essentially had to re-implement the entire low-level KDCOM framing protocol so that KD packets can be transferred to and received from an unmodified DbgEng using the already-existing KDCOM over named pipe support. This approach entailed a rather unfortunate amount of extra baggage that needed to be carried around as many features of the KDCOM protocol are unnecessary in light of the new environment that local virtual machine kernel debugging presents.

In the interests of both reducing the complexity of the kernel mode code running in guest operating systems and improving the performance of VMKD (with respect to any possible “overhead traffic”, such as retransmits or resynchronization related requests), the KDCOM framing protocol is implemented host-side in the logic that is running in the modified VMM. This approach also had the additional advantage (during the development process) of the KDCOM framing logic being relatively easily debuggable with a conventional debugger on the host machine. This is in stark contrast to almost all of the guest-side kernel mode driver, which by virtue of being right in the middle of the communication path with the kernel debugger itself, happens to be unfortunately immune to being debugged via the conventional kernel debugger. (A VMM-implemented OS-agnostic debugger, similar in principal to a hardware debugger (ICE) could conceivably have been used to debug the guest-side driver logic if necessary, but putting the KDCOM framing code in user mode host-side is simply much more convenient.)

The KDCOM framing code in the host-side portion of VMKD fulfills the last major piece of the project. At this point, it is now possible to get kernel debugger send and receive requests into and out of the kernel with an accelerated interface that is optimized for execution in a VM, and successfully transport this data to and from DbgEng for consumption by the kernel debugger.

One alternative that I explored to intercepting execution at KdSendPacket and KdReceivePacket guest-side was to simply hook the internal KDCOM routines for sending and receiving characters from the serial port. This approach, while saving the trouble of having to reimplement KDCOM essentially from the ground up, proved problematic and less reliable than I had initially hoped (I suspect timing and buffering differences from a real 16-byte-buffering UART were at fault for the reliability issues this approach encountered). Furthermore, such an approach was in general somewhat less performant than the KdSendPacket and KdReceivePacket solution, as all of the KDCOM “meta-traffic” with respect to resends, acknowledgments, and the like needed to traverse the guest to host boundary instead of being confined to just the host as in the model that VMKD uses currently.

Next time: Future directions that could be taken on VMKD’s general approach to improving the kernel debugging experience with respect to virtual machines.

4 Responses to “Fast kernel debugging for VMware, part 5: Bridging the Gap to DbgEng.dll”

  1. […] Nynaeve Adventures in Windows debugging and reverse engineering. « Fast kernel debugging for VMware, part 5: Bridging the Gap to DbgEng.dll […]

  2. […] debugging hypercalls, as currently defined, are in fact very much reminiscent of how I originally implemented VMKD. The hypercalls define an interface for a partition to send large chunks of kernel debugger data […]

  3. Koby Kahane says:

    Does kd actually work as a KDCOM client over TCP in the latest DTW?

    Consider the scenario presented in this post:
    http://blog.neocleus.com/2009/06/11/debug-xen-hosted-windows-kernel-over-network/

    If kd can do KDCOM over TCP directly, there would be no need for the tcp2pipe proxy they mention. However, my attempts to invoke kd -k with a TCP connection string resulted in invalid parameter errors.

  4. Skywing says:

    Koby: You can use kdsrv to remote kd over the network. (You still need a second box to make the actual physical connection to the debugged machine, however.)

    Be warned that performance is often poor over WAN links as this remotes the whole KD protocol (which is one packet at a time and needing retransits, ACKs) as far as I know.