Difference between bare metal hypervisor and operating system

I'm currently studying virtualization and while looking at hypervisors I realized that bare metal hypervisors are quite similar to operating systems.

So while from an application standpoint they are different, can an operating system theoretically be viewed as bare metal hypervisor?

I think you're right to notice this strong connection. At a high level, there is a strong similarity between a hypervisor and a microkernel operating system.

There are also some differences. Hypervisors are specialized to supporting virtual machines. Conventional operating systems are specialized to supporting user-mode applications. For instance, conventional operating systems often include many device drivers, support for scheduling of user-mode tasks, and other functionality that isn't relevant or needed for hosting virtual machines. Hypervisors tend to allocate/manage/schedule resources at a coarser granularity and using less sophisticated scheduling/allocation schemes.

StackExchange Computer Science Q#156570, answer score: 23