Xen's Underpinnings: The Gory Details
So, with this concept of virtual devices firmly in mind, the question becomes: What does a computer need to provide at the most basic level? The Xen developers considered this question at length and concluded that Xen would have to manage CPU time, interrupts, memory, block devices, and network.
The hypervisor operates much like the very core of a traditional operating system, parceling out CPU time and resources to the operating systems that run under it, which in turn allocate resources to their individual processes. Just as modern operating systems can transparently pause a process, the Xen hypervisor can pause an operating system, hand control to another for a while, and then seamlessly restart the paused ...
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