VirtIO: The De-Facto Standard for High-Performance Virtual I/O
Traditional virtualization (full emulation) has a major drawback: . virtio
In simple terms: Without Virtio, the guest VM emulates old, slow physical hardware (e.g., a generic IDE disk). With Virtio, the guest uses a fast, direct, and efficient communication channel to the host’s physical resources. the guest VM emulates old
: Virtio uses a paravirtualized approach, where the guest operating system is aware that it is running in a virtualized environment. The guest OS uses a specialized driver (virtio driver) to communicate directly with a virtio device in the host. slow physical hardware (e.g.
The future of Virtio looks bright, with several developments on the horizon:
The driver residing within the virtual machine. It publishes I/O requests into shared memory areas.