zlacker

They did consider KVM initially; I don't know how much things have changed and if they've reconsidered. The reasoning was that KVM's means of virtualization is too closely coupled with the Linux kernel, whereas Xen's hypervisor and dom0 are more separable.

> In Xen, at no point does the execution path jump out of the hypervisor to e.g. Dom0. Everything is contained within the hypervisor. Consequently itʼs easier to perform the careful security code audit of the Xen hypervisor, as itʼs clear which code really belongs to the hypervisor.

From the original 0.3 spec