Virtualization related notes

Guest vs Host:

  • Host – usually runs on physical hardware, lower level.
  • Guest – runs on the virtual/virtualized environment, upper level.

Virtualization types:

  • Full virtualization –  virtualize all the devices!
    • Can run almost all the operating systems without any modifications.
    • Emulate all the devicesn.
    • Slower than Paravirtualization and Operating-system-level virtualization.
    • Software Emulation (Without Hardware-Assisted-Virtualization)
      • Very Slow.
      • Need to do some jobs like binary translation or software instruction decode, will have a heavy overhead, is very inefficiet.
    • Paravirtualization on HVM
      • Full virtualization with paravirtualization drivers.
  • Paravirtualization(PV) – use modified kernel to interact with the special interface
    • Guest knows it’s a guest on the host, the guest will communicate with hypervisor.
    • Use hypercall (call to hypervisor) as its system call.
    • Hard(almost impossible) to modify the kernel of closed-source operating systems like Windows to use this method.
    • Faster than full virtualization but slower than operating-system-level virtualization.
  • Hardware-Assisted-Virtualization (HVM, HAV)
    • Using help from hardware capabilities.
    • Faster than Software Emulation.
    • Technic examples
  • Operating-system-level virtualization – don’t really virtualize the devices
    • Fastest – SUPER FAST!!!
    • Isolate different user space instances.
    • Don’t need hardware support.
    • Must run on the same kernel
      • Means bad compatibility.
    • Examples:
  • Partial virtualization – need be confirmed, not a usual type

Type-1 vs type-2 hypervisor:

Wikipedia also use Application/Environment and OS level to distinguish different types of virtualization:

  • Application-level
    • Sandbox
  • Environment-level
    • Containers
  • OS-level
    • Hypervisors

Common integrated virtualization solutions:

Resources and references:

The paravirtualization spectrum

source : https://blog.xenproject.org/2012/10/31/the-paravirtualization-spectrum-part-2-from-poles-to-a-spectrum/

Still learning, hope that there are not too many wrong things here … comments to point out mistakes/weak points are welcome!