Overview of Paravirtualization

In the more lightweight paravirtualization, the operating system is both aware of the virtualization layer and modified to support it, which results in higher performance.

The paravirtualized guest domain operating system is ported to run on top of the hypervisor, and uses virtual network, disk, and console devices.

Since the control domain must work closely with the hypervisor layer, control domain is always paravirtualized. Guest domains can be either paravirtualized or fully virtualized.