[persnickety]

If you're using a hypervisor, then the userspace program inside the VM is also using the CPU and memory directly. You'd have to do full emulation to avoid that.

Even with full emulation, I'd say memory is being accessed directly, unless you really go out of your way to make it weird.

[icedchai]

With full emulation, I'd argue memory access is not direct. Memory access from the emulated system will go through user space code in the emulator. That code may translate it to actual memory access, or perhaps an emulated, memory mapped I/O device like a frame buffer. Either way, there is something in the middle.

You could argue that nothing is direct unless you're running on a bare metal system, no MMU, no page tables. How do you define "direct"?

[persnickety]

For the definition I used earlier, the bytes don't change shape in between. That makes MMU and interpreted access direct, and compression indirect.