path: root/doc/manual/en_US/user_Glossary.xml

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<glossary id="Glossary">
  <glossdiv>
    <title>A</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>ACPI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, an industry
        specification for BIOS and hardware extensions to configure PC
        hardware and perform power management. Windows 2000 and higher as well
        as Linux 2.4 and higher support ACPI. Windows can only enable or
        disable ACPI support at installation time.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>AHCI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Advanced Host Controller Interface, the interface that supports
        SATA devices such as hard disks. See <xref
        linkend="harddiskcontrollers" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>AMD-V</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>The hardware virtualization features built into modern AMD
        processors. See <xref linkend="hwvirt" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>API</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Application Programming Interface.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>APIC</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller, a newer version of
        the original PC PIC (programmable interrupt controller). Most modern
        CPUs contain an on-chip APIC ("local APIC"). Many systems also contain
        an I/O APIC (input output APIC) as a separate chip which provides more
        than 16 IRQs. Windows 2000 and higher use a different kernel if they
        detect an I/O APIC during installation. Therefore an I/O APIC must not
        be removed after installation.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>ATA</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Advanced Technology Attachment, an industry standard for hard
        disk interfaces (synonymous with IDE). See <xref
        linkend="harddiskcontrollers" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>B</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>BIOS</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Basic Input/Output System, the firmware built into most personal
        computers which is responsible of initializing the hardware after the
        computer has been turned on and then booting an operating system.
        VirtualBox ships with its own virtual BIOS that runs when a virtual
        machine is started.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>C</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>COM</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Microsoft Component Object Model, a programming infrastructure
        for modular software. COM allows applications to provide application
        programming interfaces which can be accessed from various other
        programming languages and applications. VirtualBox makes use of COM
        both internally and externally to provide a comprehensive API to 3rd
        party developers.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>D</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>DHCP</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. This allows a networking
        device in a network to acquire its IP address (and other networking
        details) automatically, in order to avoid having to configure all
        devices in a network with fixed IP addresses. VirtualBox has a
        built-in DHCP server that delivers an IP addresses to a virtual
        machine when networking is configured to NAT; see <xref
        linkend="networkingdetails" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>DKMS</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Dynamic Kernel Module Support. A framework that simplifies
        installing and updating external kernel modules on Linux machines; see
        <xref linkend="externalkernelmodules" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>E</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>EFI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Extensible Firmware Interface, a firmware built into computers
        which is designed to replace the aging BIOS. Originally designed by
        Intel, most modern operating systems can now boot on computers which
        have EFI instead of a BIOS built into them; see <xref
        linkend="efi" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>EHCI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Enhanced Host Controller Interface, the interface that
        implements the USB 2.0 standard.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>G</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>GUI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Graphical User Interface. Commonly used as an antonym to a
        "command line interface", in the context of VirtualBox, we sometimes
        refer to the main graphical
        <computeroutput>VirtualBox</computeroutput> program as the "GUI", to
        differentiate it from the <computeroutput>VBoxManage</computeroutput>
        interface.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>GUID</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>See UUID.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>I</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>IDE</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Integrated Drive Electronics, an industry standard for hard disk
        interfaces. See <xref linkend="harddiskcontrollers" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>I/O APIC</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>See APIC.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>iSCSI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Internet SCSI; see <xref linkend="storage-iscsi" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>M</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>MAC</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Media Access Control, a part of an Ethernet network card. A MAC
        address is a 6-byte number which identifies a network card. It is
        typically written in hexadecimal notation where the bytes are
        separated by colons, such as
        <computeroutput>00:17:3A:5E:CB:08</computeroutput>.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>MSI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Message Signalled Interrupts, as supported by modern chipsets
        such as the ICH9; see <xref linkend="settings-motherboard" />. As
        opposed to traditional pin-based interrupts, with MSI, a small amount
        of data can accompany the actual interrupt message. This reduces the
        amount of hardware pins required, allows for more interrupts and
        better performance.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>N</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>NAT</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Network Address Translation. A technique to share networking
        interfaces by which an interface modifies the source and/or target IP
        addresses of network packets according to specific rules. Commonly
        employed by routers and firewalls to shield an internal network from
        the Internet, VirtualBox can use NAT to easily share a host's physical
        networking hardware with its virtual machines. See <xref
        linkend="network_nat" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>O</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>OVF</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Open Virtualization Format, a cross-platform industry standard
        to exchange virtual appliances between virtualization products; see
        <xref linkend="ovf" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>P</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>PAE</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Physical Address Extension. This allows accessing more than 4 GB
        of RAM even in 32-bit environments; see <xref
        linkend="settings-general-advanced" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>PIC</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>See APIC.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>PXE</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Preboot Execution Environment, an industry standard for booting
        PC systems from remote network locations. It includes DHCP for IP
        configuration and TFTP for file transfer. Using UNDI, a hardware
        independent driver stack for accessing the network card from bootstrap
        code is available.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>R</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>RDP</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Remote Desktop Protocol, a protocol developed by Microsoft as an
        extension to the ITU T.128 and T.124 video conferencing protocol. With
        RDP, a PC system can be controlled from a remote location using a
        network connection over which data is transferred in both directions.
        Typically graphics updates and audio are sent from the remote machine
        and keyboard and mouse input events are sent from the client. A
        VirtualBox extension package by Oracle provides VRDP, an enhanced
        implementation of the relevant standards which is largely compatible
        with Microsoft's RDP implementation. See <xref linkend="vrde" /> for
        details.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>S</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>SAS</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Serial Attached SCSI, an industry standard for hard disk
        interfaces. See <xref linkend="harddiskcontrollers" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>SATA</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Serial ATA, an industry standard for hard disk interfaces. See
        <xref linkend="harddiskcontrollers" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>SCSI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Small Computer System Interface. An industry standard for data
        transfer between devices, especially for storage. See <xref
        linkend="harddiskcontrollers" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>SMP</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Symmetrical Multiprocessing, meaning that the resources of a
        computer are shared between several processors. These can either be
        several processor chips or, as is more common with modern hardware,
        multiple CPU cores in one processor.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>SSD</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Solid-state drive, uses microchips for storing data in a computer
        system. Compared to classical hard-disks they are having no mechanical
        components like spinning disks.
        </para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>T</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>TAR</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>A widely used file format for archiving. Originally, this stood
        for "Tape ARchive" and was already supported by very early Unix
        versions for backing up data on tape. The file format is still widely
        used today, for example, with OVF archives (with an
        <computeroutput>.ova</computeroutput> file extension); see <xref
        linkend="ovf" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>U</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>UUID</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>A Universally Unique Identifier -- often also called GUID
        (Globally Unique Identifier) -- is a string of numbers and letters
        which can be computed dynamically and is guaranteed to be unique.
        Generally, it is used as a global handle to identify entities.
        VirtualBox makes use of UUIDs to identify VMs, Virtual Disk Images
        (VDI files) and other entities.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>V</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>VM</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Virtual Machine -- a virtual computer that VirtualBox allows you
        to run on top of your actual hardware. See <xref
        linkend="virtintro" /> for details.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>VMM</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Virtual Machine Manager -- the component of VirtualBox that
        controls VM execution. See <xref linkend="technical-components" /> for
        a list of VirtualBox components.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>VRDE</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>VirtualBox Remote Desktop Extension. This interface is built
        into VirtualBox to allow VirtualBox extension packages to supply
        remote access to virtual machines. A VirtualBox extension package by
        Oracle provides VRDP support; see <xref linkend="vrde" /> for
        details.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>VRDP</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>See RDP.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>VT-x</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>The hardware virtualization features built into modern Intel
        processors. See <xref linkend="hwvirt" />.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>

  <glossdiv>
    <title>X</title>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>XML</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>The eXtensible Markup Language, a metastandard for all kinds of
        textual information. XML only specifies how data in the document is
        organized generally and does not prescribe how to semantically
        organize content.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>

    <glossentry>
      <glossterm>XPCOM</glossterm>

      <glossdef>
        <para>Mozilla Cross Platform Component Object Model, a programming
        infrastructure developed by the Mozilla browser project which is
        similar to Microsoft COM and allows applications to provide a modular
        programming interface. VirtualBox makes use of XPCOM on Linux both
        internally and externally to provide a comprehensive API to
        third-party developers.</para>
      </glossdef>
    </glossentry>
  </glossdiv>
</glossary>