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Sure, Vbox has kernel support for guest OSes. As far as being a hypervisor however, Vbox is strictly a type 2, i.e. it needs a host OS to run and resources are
by sayhello 15y ago
Sure, Vbox has kernel support for guest OSes.
As far as being a hypervisor however, Vbox is strictly a type 2, i.e. it needs a host OS to run and resources are allocated to it.
In contrast, Xen and KVM are type 1 hypervisors, meaning they themselves allocate resources for guest OSes from bare metal.
There are debates about the semantics of whether KVM is type 1 or type 2 due to its implementation on top of the Linux kernel, but it is definitely in a different league than Vbox.
- aliguori 15y agoThe folks that through around type 1 and type 2 usually don't actually know what it means. It refers to a relatively obscure set of formal proofs and doesn't have anything to do with what most people explain it as.
- MPSimmons 15y agoYou mean Wikipedia would lie to me??? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
- aliguori 15y agoThe problem is that the phrase used in Popek's paper is "Conventional OS". This was the 1970s. What's now considered a "Conventional OS" was not conventional back then. For instance, everyone would agree Linux is a conventional OS but Linux provides a kernel module (KVM) that allows for virtualization driven by userspace.