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xen/docs/glossary.rst
Andrew Cooper 31cbb8e2a5 docs/guest-guide: Describe the PV traps and entrypoints ABI
... seeing as I've had to thoroughly reverse engineer it for FRED and make
tweaks in places.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>
2026-03-03 15:15:53 +00:00

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.. SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
Glossary
========
.. Terms should appear in alphabetical order
.. glossary::
control domain
A :term:`domain`, commonly dom0, with the permission and responsibility
to create and manage other domains on the system.
domain
A domain is Xen's unit of resource ownership, and generally has at the
minimum some RAM and virtual CPUs.
The terms :term:`domain` and :term:`guest` are commonly used
interchangeably, but they mean subtly different things.
A guest is a single, end user, virtual machine.
In some cases, e.g. during live migration, one guest will be comprised of
two domains for a period of time, while it is in transit.
domid
The numeric identifier of a running :term:`domain`. It is unique to a
single instance of Xen, used as the identifier in various APIs, and is
typically allocated sequentially from 0.
CET
Control-flow Enforcement Technology is a facility in x86 CPUs for
defending against memory safety vulnerabilities. It is formed of two
independent features:
* CET-SS, Shadow Stacks, are designed to protect against Return Oriented
Programming (ROP) attacks.
* CET-IBT, Indirect Branch Tracking, is designed to protect against Call
or Jump Oriented Programming (COP/JOP) attacks.
Intel support CET-SS and CET-IBT from the Tiger Lake (Client, 2020) and
Sapphire Rapids (Server, 2023) CPUs. AMD support only CET-SS, starting
with Zen3 (Both client and server, 2020) CPUs.
event channel
A paravirtual facility for guests to send and receive interrupts.
guest
The term 'guest' has two different meanings, depending on context, and
should not be confused with :term:`domain`.
When discussing a Xen system as a whole, a 'guest' refer to a virtual
machine which is the "useful output" of running the system in the first
place (e.g. an end-user VM). Virtual machines providing system services,
(e.g. the control and/or hardware domains), are not considered guests in
this context.
In the code, "guest context" and "guest state" is considered in terms of
the CPU architecture, and contrasted against hypervisor context/state.
In this case, it refers to all code running lower privilege privilege
level the hypervisor. As such, it covers all domains, including ones
providing system services.
hardware domain
A :term:`domain`, commonly dom0, which shares responsibility with Xen
about the system as a whole.
By default it gets all devices, including all disks and network cards, so
is responsible for multiplexing guest I/O.