Introduction

UML is a port of Linux to itself. That is, it treats Linux as a platform to which the kernel can be ported, like platforms such as Intel and Alpha. The architecture-dependent code which comprises UML implements all of the low-level hardware support that the generic kernel needs in terms of Linux system calls. It is implemented using only system calls - there are no special patches or hooks needed in the host kernel.

It runs the same userspace as the host kernel, and is able to run almost same range of applications - the exceptions are a few highly non-portable things such as

• installation procedures which aggressively probe for hardware using privileged instructions
• emulators such as dosemu, wine, and plex86

Userspace code runs natively on the processor without any sort of instruction emulation.

Processes running inside UML have no access to host resources that were not explicitly provided to the virtual machine.