A soft partitioning system for allowing multiple virtual system environments to execute on a single platform may include I/O service partitions (IOSPs). The IOSPs operating in a separate virtual memory space on the platform and service disk and network requests from multiple guests. The IOSPs provide translation from virtual addresses to physical addresses such that from the point of view of the guest the virtual addresses used by the guest appear to be physical addresses. The IOSP may be implemented in a Linux kernel. The address space of the IOSP may be extended to include DMA memory sections such that the Linux kernel does not include all of the guest s memory. The IOSP may operate on hardware that does or does not support virtualization technology for directed I/O
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