Virtualization Types docs.aws.amazon.com View Original June 15th, 2014 Amazon Machine Images use one of two types of virtualization: paravirtual (PV) or hardware virtual machine (HVM). Some current generation instance types support only HVM AMIs, while some previous generation instance types support only PV AMIs. The main difference between PV and HVM AMIs is the way in which they boot and whether or not they can take advantage of special hardware extensions (CPU, network, and storage) for better performance. Paravirtual (PV) Paravirtual AMIs boot with a special boot loader called PV-GRUB, which starts the boot cycle and then chain loads the kernel specified in the menu.lst file on your image. Only Linux AMIs can use PV virtualization. Paravirtual guests can run on host hardware that does not have explicit support for virtualization, but they cannot take advantage of special hardware extensions such as enhanced networking or GPU processing. Historically, PV guests ...