Operating Systems · Security

Virtual machines and containers

Running an entire guest OS, or a lightweight container, on top of a host OS or hypervisor.

Also known as: hypervisors, VMs, containers, OS-level virtualization.

Start a lesson on Virtual machines and containers

Learn first

• Address spaces: Each process's private view of memory, starting at zero, that the OS maps onto real physical RAM.
• The process abstraction: A running program's isolated illusion of its own CPU and memory, tracked by the OS as a process control block.

Related topics

• Protection and security basics: The privilege levels and access checks that keep one process from reading or corrupting another's memory.