Paravirtualization

In computing, paravirtualization is a virtualization technique that presents the abstraction of virtual machines with a software interface that is similar but not identical to that of the underlying hardware. This requires operating systems to be explicitly ported to run on top of the virtual machine monitor (VMM) but may enable the VMM itself to be simpler and for the virtual machines that run on it to achieve higher performance.

The term "paravirtualization" was first used in the research literature in association with the Denali virtual machine monitor. The term is also used to describe the Xen and L4 hypervisors. All these projects use paravirtualization techniques to support high performance virtual machines on x86 hardware.