The Book of Xen

Putting It Together

In general, all of these implementation details demonstrate Xen's focus on simplicity and code reuse. Where possible, the Xen developers have chosen to focus on providing and managing channels between physical devices and virtual devices, letting Linux userspace tools and kernel mechanisms handle arbitration and device access. Also, the actual work is offloaded as much as possible to the dom0 so as to reduce the complexity of the hypervisor and maximize device support.

For the administrator, this means that Xen can be administered and monitored, by and large, with standard tools, and that most interactions with Xen take place at the level of the dom0. When Xen is installed and domains are running, the Xen domains act like normal, ...