What Is Paravirtualized Operating System?
Imagine, if you wish, a kitchen with no pots, pans, or even a cutting board. You and your stovetop are the only things in it. You have no cooking equipment except an empty bowl and some water. That's what paravirtualization is like for an operating system (OS). It's like having no ingredients to work with, but instead of going out and buying food, you have to ask your virtual machine (VM) what it wants you to cook with. What does it mean? What does it do? Most importantly: why should you care? Paravirtualization allows for a software interface that facilitates communication between the guest OS and the host virtualization platform. A paravirtualized operating system (OS) is modified to run in a paravirtualized environment that provides a software interface to virtual machines similar to but not identical to the underlying hardware. In paravirtualized mode, the guest OS is explicitly ported for the para application programming interface (API) to facilitate communication with the host virtualization platform. If you want to get the best of both worlds, a paravirtualized operating system is a way. A paravirtualized operating system does not require whole system emulation. The management module, or hypervisor, in a paravirtualized mode, operates within a paravirtualized operating system that has been modified to work in a virtual machine. This means your computer can run on top of an existing operating system, like Windows or Linux, and still use its native features, like multitasking and networking capabilities. Virtualization has many benefits, but it can also be a drag on performance. Most virtualized environments are built on sharing resources between the host and guest domains, meaning that you use resources from your host domain any time you're executing tasks in your guest domain. This is great for sharing resources between different users or applications but only helps a little if you're trying to keep up with a demanding CPU-intensive task. A paravirtualized operating system, on the other hand, can reduce overall performance degradation by relocating critical task execution from the virtual domain to the host domain. In other words: instead of running your CPU-heavy tasks in both the host and guest domains simultaneously, you can run them all in one place, the host domain and save yourself some hassle!
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