InfoWorld: Xen 3.0 Makes Paravirtualization Mainstream

“Before the Xen project popped up on my radar three years ago,
I’d never heard of paravirtualization. In this technique, an
altered version of an operating system redirects privileged
operations–the bare metal code that restructures virtual memory
and communicates with devices–to a thin ‘hypervisor’ layer,
instead of sending them directly to the CPU. It’s far, far more
efficient than intercepting and redirecting privileged operations
at the CPU instruction level, as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server,
and other hardware emulation-based virtualization solutions must
do.

“Xen plants itself into a Linux source code tree as the
equivalent of a new CPU architecture. When you compile Linux with
Xen as the target architecture, you end up with a Linux that has
paravirtualization baked in, rather than strapped on…”

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