The Great Virtualisation Secret

In order to gain the performance benefits of paravirtualisation:-

- The guest operating system must now be aware of its virtualisation state and is optimized for it.

- There is full OS integration and resource management (ie no binary patching required between the host OS and the virtual software in order to access the hardware)

In diagram 2, Virtual Aware O/S 1 is paravirtualised because it has been modified to be aware that it is virtualised and can talk directly to the underlying host o/s.

It should be emphasised that it is the modification of the guest OS that allows paravirtualisation to take place.

Diagram 2