Mastering KVM Virtualization

Hardware assisted virtualization

Intel and AMD realized that full virtualization and paravirtualization are the major challenges of virtualization on the x86 architecture (as the scope of this book is limited to x86 architecture, we will mainly discuss the evolution of this architecture here) due to the performance overhead and complexity in designing and maintaining the solution. Intel and AMD independently created new processor extensions of the x86 architecture, called Intel VT-x and AMD-V respectively. On the Itanium architecture, hardware-assisted virtualization is known as VT-i. Hardware assisted virtualization is a platform virtualization method designed to efficiently use full virtualization with the hardware capabilities. Various vendors ...