virtualbox.org

I'm running Windows 10 in a virtual machine on Kubuntu 20.04.1. I have an icon in the statusbar with a "V" and a rainbow meter beside it. When I mouse-over it, it tells me that my paravirtualization interface is Hyper-V. What does that mean?

I thought Hyper-V was a proprietary Microsoft thing, only available on Windows.

VinceAggrippino wrote:my paravirtualization interface is Hyper-V

The paravirtualization interface is a communication channel between a virtualization-aware OS, like modern Windows or Linux, and the hypervisor, in this case Virtualbox. The paravirtualization interface does not have anything to do with what kind of hypervisor is running the guest OS.

Linux does not have the Hyper-V hypervisor.

VinceAggrippino wrote:I thought Hyper-V was a proprietary Microsoft thing, only available on Windows.

You know how Linux PCs can use SAMBA (an implementation of the Windows SMB sharing protocol) to share stuff with Windows PCs? Same thing.

In both cases the interface was invented for a particular purpose (Windows talking to Windows), but other hosts can and do implement compatible interfaces.

VirtualBox can also present a KVM compatible interface to Linux guests running on Windows hosts. Again, same thing.