the.com/hypervisor
The landlord renting one computer's guts to a dozen pretend computers who've never met.
means A thin layer of software that sits between physical hardware and multiple operating systems, letting each think it owns the whole machine.
from Coined in computing by playing on 'supervisor,' the older term for an operating system's core control program. If the OS is a 'supervisor' managing programs, something that manages multiple supervisors at once needed to outrank it — hence 'hyper' (over, above) plus 'visor,' from Latin 'visus/videre,' to see or oversee. The word surfaces in IBM mainframe work going back to the 1960s, when engineers first needed a term for software that could watch over several operating systems sharing one machine.
- type 1
- runs directly on hardware, no OS needed
- type 2
- runs atop an OS, like VirtualBox
- ring -1
- sits below the kernel, lies to it convincingly
- powers
- basically all of cloud computing