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It is somewhat disappointing to see the term "OS virtualisation" used to describe what is really still just virtualised hardware; albeit with a less traditional
by jclulow 12y ago
It is somewhat disappointing to see the term "OS virtualisation" used to describe what is really still just virtualised hardware; albeit with a less traditional OS on top of the HVM hypervisor. It makes more sense to reserve the term to distinguish container-based technologies, where what is virtualised _is_ the operating system -- not the hardware it runs on.
- avsm 12y agoThe term "OS virtualisation" is just fine here -- it refers to the support required to virtualise an operating system, which conventionally means the device driver, scheduler and memory interfaces. Providing such a layer lets any reinterpretation of "OS" still run above it. Container-based technologies are far more nebulous in their definition, since it covers individual operating system concepts that don't quite migrate across distributions. FreeBSD jails, Solaris zones, LXC, MacOS X app sandboxes are all container-based virtualisation, but differ greatly in their details and specific interfaces.