HP ML350 Server virtualization technologies for x86-based HP BladeSystem and H - Page 19

Hosted OS, kernel-layer abstraction Kernel-layer abstraction refers to a technique in which the abstraction technology is built directly into the OS kernel rather than having a separate hypervisor layer. This approach can still follow the requirements of hardware-assisted (AMD-V or Intel VT-x virtualization technologies) and paravirtualization, but removes the discrete hypervisor layer. The direct access to hardware could potentially provide greater performance than using a binary translation technology; however, because there is no separation between the hypervisor the operating system, there is the possibility that resource conflicts may occur between multiple virtual machines.6 6 See the article titled ―Xen proponents question merits of Red Hat KVM hypervisor‖ at http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,,sid94_gci1318772,00.html; and for the opposing view, see Qumranet's white paper titled ‖KVM - Kernel-based Virtualization Machine‖ at www.qumranet.com/files/white_papers/KVM_Whitepaper.pdf. 19