Hypervisor

The hypervisor is Xen itself. It goes between the hardware and the operating systems of the various domains. The hypervisor is responsible for checking page tables, allocating resources for new domains, and scheduling domains. It presents the domains with a VirtualMachine that looks similar but not identical to the native architecture. It is also responsible for booting the machine enough that it can start dom0.

Just as applications can interact with an OS by giving it syscalls, domains interact with the hypervisor by giving it hypercalls. The hypervisor responds by sending the domain an event, which fulfils the same function as an IRQ on real hardware.