Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by runjake 892 days ago
They are very important distinctions and they are completely different.

Virtualization abstracts the actual underlying hardware, creating a virtual instance. You are executing instructions directly on the host CPU with little or no overhead, so it’s fast.

Emulation mimics one system on a different system by converting the instructions of the mimicked system into instructions the host platform can understand. It is generally a very slow process.