Speaking at this year's Linux and open source conference in Sydney, Intel software engineer Jeff Dike spoke about three virtualization methods - User Mode Linux (UML), Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and hardware virtualization.

Dike said Intel introduced VT extensions to the x86 architecture to support "fully virtualized guest contexts" with all the processor's instructions being available. This allows unmodified Linux kernels to run virtualized on one processor.

With Linux running on the host, Dike said the "guest" operating systems should look like they are present in the normal Linux "userspace," or what the user interacts with.

In August last year KVM was introduced into Linux which provides VT in the form of a driver.

"When a process opens KVM it becomes a process container for the guests," Dike said, adding it is not a bad interface. "This could be turned into something not that bad. [The] idea of having everything controlled from userspace [allows] you to have a guest look like a binary and script it."