Paravirtualization
Search IT Operations, Monday, March 18th, 2024
Paravirtualization is a type of hardware virtualization that enables the guest operating system (OS) in a virtual machine (VM) to access the hypervisor directly, rather than indirectly through a complex abstraction layer, as is the case with conventional full virtualization.
Full virtualization logically isolates the individual VMs and emulates all the hardware resources, relying on binary translations to carry out operations. Paravirtualization takes a more streamlined approach that enables the guest OSes to share resources more efficiently and interact with the hypervisor in a way that improves performance.
With paravirtualization, the VMs access system resources directly through interfaces similar to the underlying hardware. This architecture helps to deliver better performance than full virtualization because the guest OS and hypervisor work together more efficiently. To achieve these benefits, however, the guest OS must be modified to support paravirtualization. Some Linux distributions include this support.