The Xen Hypervisor documentation

Note

Xen’s Sphinx/RST documentation is a work in progress. The existing documentation can be found at https://xenbits.xen.org/docs/

Xen is an open source, bare metal hypervisor. It runs as the most privileged piece of software on the system, and shares the resources of the hardware between virtual machines. See Introduction for an introduction to a Xen system.

User documentation

This is documentation for an administrator of a Xen system. It is intended for someone who is not necesserily a developer, has installed Xen from their preferred distribution, and is attempting to run virtual machines and configure the system.

Guest documentation

This documentation concerns the APIs and ABIs available to guests. It is intended for OS developers trying to use a Xen feature, and for Xen developers to avoid breaking things.

Hypervisor developer documentation

This is documentation for a hypervisor developer. It is intended for someone who is building Xen from source, and is running the new hypervisor in some kind of development environment.

Miscellanea