Re: [Xen-devel] "Bounties" on XEN to Windows2000 support

[Mark Williamson <maw48@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > paravirtualization
>
> What is this?

Paravirtualisation is where the virtual machine monitor doesn't provide the 
illusion of real hardware but of a new virtual platform that's better suited 
to virtualisation (In Xen's case, the Xen <-> guest OS interface is the new 
virtual platform).

On an architecture like x86, which is difficult to virtualise, this makes it 
possible to produce simpler and higher performance virtual machine monitors 
*But* it requires modifications to the guest OS.

Contrast this to Full Virtualisation solutions (like VMWare) where the Guest 
OS believes it is running on a real physical machine, with real world 
hardware devices.  This gives good support for unmodified OSs but it's harder 
to do and incurs some performance penalty.

HTH,
Mark


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