WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-devel

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

> > 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


-------------------------------------------------------
SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide
Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users.
Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. 
http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/
_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xen-devel