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 later,
          as well as Linux 2.4 and later 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          Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller, a newer version of
          the original PC PIC (programmable interrupt controller).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, called a 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 later 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 which is 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. &product-name; 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 enables applications to provide
          application programming interfaces which can be accessed from
          various other programming languages and applications.
          &product-name; 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 enables 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.
          &product-name; 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>

  </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 &product-name;, we
          sometimes refer to the main graphical
          <command>VirtualBox</command> program as the "GUI", to
          differentiate it from the <command>VBoxManage</command>
          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
          <literal>00:17:3A:5E:CB:08</literal>.
        </para>

      </glossdef>

    </glossentry>

    <glossentry><glossterm>MSI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>

        <para>
          Message Signaled 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 and
          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, &product-name; 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 enables access to 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. An &product-name;
          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 using
          an <filename>.ova</filename> 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). A UUID 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. &product-name; 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 &product-name;
          enables 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 &product-name; that
          controls VM execution. See
          <xref linkend="technical-components" /> for a list of
          &product-name; components.
        </para>

      </glossdef>

    </glossentry>

    <glossentry><glossterm>VRDE</glossterm>

      <glossdef>

        <para>
          VirtualBox Remote Desktop Extension. This interface is built
          into &product-name; to allow &product-name; extension packages
          to supply remote access to virtual machines. An &product-name;
          extension package by Oracle provides VRDP support. See
          <xref linkend="vrde" />.
        </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>xHCI</glossterm>

      <glossdef>

        <para>
          eXtended Host Controller Interface, the interface that
          implements the USB 3.0 standard.
        </para>

      </glossdef>

    </glossentry>

    <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 enables applications to
          provide a modular programming interface. &product-name; makes
          use of XPCOM on Linux both internally and externally to
          provide a comprehensive API to third-party developers.
        </para>

      </glossdef>

    </glossentry>

  </glossdiv>

</glossary>