Several embodiments of the present invention provide a means for reducing
overhead and, thus, improving operating efficiency in virtualized
computing systems. Certain of these embodiments are specifically directed
to providing a bypass mechanism for jumping directly from a first stack
in the guest operating system to a second stack in the host operating
system for a virtual machine environment. More specifically, certain
embodiments of the present invention are directed to a system for and
method of eliminating redundancy in execution of certain virtual machine
commands and executing host environment equivalents by using bypass
mechanisms, thereby bypassing redundant software layers within the guest
and host stacks. For some of these embodiments, the bypass mechanism
operates at a high-level component of the stack or, alternatively, the
bypass mechanism operates at a low-level component of the stack.