I'm using a different (and I believe more accurate) definition of virtual machine, and I'm using it because I think it offers more insight. There are many poss

I'm using a different (and I believe more accurate) definition of virtual machine, and I'm using it because I think it offers more insight. There are many possible chips you might have running inside your workstation, and none of them are the hardware they pretend to be, they are many varieties of microcoded superscalars that emulate the functionality of an amd64 architecture. They are virtual amd64s. On top of those you run OS binaries tuned for your hardware that present an API consistent with Linux (or Windows, depending on the software layers you run). If you had a hardware implementation of the Unix/Linux API, then that would be a Linux machine, but otherwise you are running a Linux virtual machine. It's the Linux physical machine that does not exist. Linux virtual machines abound. (and many of them run on processors other than amd64s) EDIT: I'm not offered a reply link to my repliers, so I'll edit answer in here instead. I use that definition of virtual machine because it's the one true definition; to use the "naive" definition is to be wrong. I thought I was making that apparent in my description. There is no actual hardware amd64, there are only microcoded emulators of the architecture. So right off the bat, you see that if we code in assembly language, we are coding to a virtual machine, not an actual machine. And just as you can think of mathematics as nothing more than the manipulation of symbols, when we write software, we are arranging symbols to code a virtual machine; in assembly language; in C; in Haskell; etc. Many (most?) C language implementations have symbolic references to the operating system. But inside that black box, we know is actually a virtual implementation on top of another virtual implementation. An analogy would be, if you learn to drive an automobile, you learn to drive all of them because they use the same arrangement (more or less) of controls. They are different physical hardware manifestations (some gas, some electric, some diesel) of the same virtual machine (steering wheel, go pedal, stop pedal). It was taught to me as a more useful definition, and I embraced it. I think using virtual machine to refer only to products from VMware is more problematic definitionally. And in particular I used it in this thread to respond to the post at the very top that seemed to suggest that all software is just software as if we can just discard the operating system when it doesn't do what we want. This is all what they teach at MIT in the computer science curriculum, BTW, nothing weird or cultish, or DOWNVOTEY about it.