Hypercall

Term: Hypercall

Definition: Special calls from a paravirtualized guest OS to the Hypervisor, similar to how system calls go from user space to the Kernel.

Context/Example: Instead of executing a privileged CPU instruction directly, a paravirtualized guest issues a hypercall so the hypervisor can perform the operation safely.

Related Concepts: Containers, namespaces, cgroups, microservices, Kubernetes.