VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
VM manager takes over the CPU ring 0 (or the “root mode” in newer CPUs) and intercepts all privileged calls made by guest OS to create illusion that guest OS has its own hardware. Fun fact: Before 1998 it was thought to be impossible to achieve this in x86 architecture because there was no way to do this kind of interception. The folks at VMWare were the first who had an idea to rewrite the executable bytes in memory for privileged calls of guest OS to achieve this.
The net effect is that virtualization allows you to run two completely different OS on same hardware. Each guest OS goes through all the process of bootstrapping, loading kernel etc. You can have very tight security, for example, guest OS can’t get full access to host OS or other guests and mess things up.
