AMI virtualization types

Linux AMI virtualization types :

Linux Amazon Machine Images use one of two types of virtualization:

• Paravirtual (PV)
• Hardware virtual machine (HVM).

The main differences between PV and HVM AMIs are the way in which they boot and whether they can take advantage of special hardware extensions (CPU, network, and storage) for better performance.

HVM guests can take advantage of hardware extensions that provide fast access to the underlying hardware on the host system.  

PV cannot take advantage of special hardware extensions such as enhanced networking or GPU processing.