Installation guide

drivers bring many of the performance advantages of para-virtualized guest operating systems to
unmodified operating systems because only the para-virtualized device driver (but not the rest of the
operating system) is aware of the underlying virtualization platform.
After installing the para-virtualized device drivers, a disk device or network card will continue to
appear as a normal, physical disk or network card to the operating system. However, now the device
driver interacts directly with the virtualization platform (with no emulation) to efficiently deliver disk
and network access, allowing the disk and network subsystems to operate at near native speeds
even in a virtualized environment, without requiring changes to existing guest operating systems.
The para-virtualized drivers have certain host requirements. 64 bit hosts can run:
32 bit guests.
64 bit guests.
a mixture of 32 bit and 64 bit guests.
12.1. Syst em requirement s
This section provides the requirements for para-virtualized drivers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Inst allat io n
Before you install the para-virtualized drivers the following requirements (listed below) must be met.
Important
All versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux from 4.7 and 5.3 have the kernel module for the para-
virtualized drivers, the pv-on-hvm module, in the default kernel package. That means the
para-virtualized drivers are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 and newer or 5.3 and
newer guests.
Note
The para-virtualized guest drivers are enabled by default for guests running Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6.1 and newer on Xen hosts. Using the xen_pv_hvm=enable kernel boot
parameter is no longer required for these guests.
You will need the following RPM packages for para-virtualized drivers for each guest operating
system installation.
Minimum host operating system version:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 or newer.
Minimum guest operating system version:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 or newer.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 6 or newer.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 9 or newer.
⁠Chapt er 1 2 . Xen Para- virt ualiz ed Drivers
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