Paravirtual

Paravirtual

This is a VM, or virtual machine, mode where the operating system does not need a complete emulation of the hardware devices.

Instead, an API, or application program interface, is needed to interact with the host virtualization platform.

Special virtualization technology hardware is not needed for paravirtual mode.

The purpose of paravirtualization is reduce the time a user spends performing operations that are more difficult to run in a VE, or virtual environment, where performance is worse.

A highly functioning paravirtualized platform may allow the VMM, virtual machine monitor, to be easier and possibly even reduce the overall degradation of machine execution performance.