Apparently Intel thought Xen was a very good thing and determined that if the Guest OS ran in a restricted ring-0, then the guest could run totally standard code, but when it tried to access a real I/O device, mm controller, etc. then an interrupt of sorts would be generated and the Host OS running in full unrestricted ring-0 would be invoked to perform the work the Guest wanted done. For more technical hardware details see http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/vptech/ Particularily see the links on the right. FYI: AMD has a competitive offering, but I think they are playing catch-up. I don't remember the name of their offering, nor do I have any idea how it works.
It is called Pacifica. I could not get the spec url though. HTH, Om. -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
