[Fedora-xen] para or fully virtualization

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 03:25:33PM +0100, Henk Altena wrote:
> Hi everybody
> 
> Following the quickstart guide of xen I can only use para-virtualized 
> guests because my Asus A8V Deluxe mainboard with AMD 64 bit processor 
> does not have the svm flag.
> Can anyone tell me the difference between Para- and Fully-virualized 
> guests ?

A fairly technical overview is here:

http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/TechOverview
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linuxvirt/?ca=dgr-lnxw01Virtual-Linux

> What are the limitations of a system that only supports para-virtulazed 
> guests ?

Fully-virtualized can (in theory) run any OS ever written.

Para-virtualized can only run OS which have been ported to Xen (eg Linux
and some varities of Solaris & BSD)

At this time, paravirtualized is significantly faster than fullvirt so if
you have the option paravirt is always preferred. With Windows of course
you don't have that option - fullvirt is only choice.

Dan.
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