Chapter 13. HVM Support
In 2006, both Intel and AMD introduced support for hardware virtual machines (HVM). Both sets of extensions are conceptually similar, and Xen interacts with both via an abstraction layer. In some ways, the existence of this hardware reduces the need for the approach taken by Xen (and other x86 virtualization solutions), and a new wave of virtualization packages have started to spring up making use of it.
13.1 Running Unmodified Operating Systems
The most obvious benefit of HVM is that it can be used to run Windows as a guest. Supporting Windows as a paravirtualized guest is possible in principle, but since the source code is not publicly available it is not feasible in practice. This ability is particularly important, ...
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