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[Xen-devel] context switch and hypervisor

To: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-devel] context switch and hypervisor
From: "Chris Zhang" <abnamro.chris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 16:11:15 +1000
Delivery-date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:11:46 -0700
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Hi,
 
I have been reading some papers from Xen and other sources, there are just a couple of questions that I found hard to understand.
 
Why is Xen hypervisor better than a traditional hypervisor? With a traditional hypervisor, during a context switch, the hypervisor stores the states of a guest OS then goes to the next OS, upon coming back to the first OS it restores the hardware states then passes it on to the first OS. Does Xen pretty much do the same thing except it provides an API to the OS, and the reason/benefit of having such an API is to reduce the time for a TLB flush?
 
Can someone please explain this to me in detail?
 
Cheers
 
Chris
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