virtiobased

Virtio-based refers to devices and drivers that use the virtio standard, a virtualization I/O framework designed to provide efficient, para-virtualized input/output in virtualized environments. The virtio subsystem defines a small, common interface and a set of device types, with the data path carried by a transport such as virtio-pci, virtio-PCIe, or virtio-mmio. By standardizing the I/O interface, virtio enables guest operating systems to interact with virtualized resources in a consistent, low-overhead way.

In typical deployments, virtio-based devices expose common classes such as network interfaces (virtio-net), block devices (virtio-blk), and other peripherals like virtio-balloon memory management, virtio-rng, and virtio-console. The guest driver talks to a virtio device via virtqueues, which are rings used to exchange requests and responses between the guest and the hypervisor. The hypervisor provides backends that map these requests to host resources. For performance, many stacks also use vhost backends to offload certain processing from the guest.

Virtio is widely adopted in Linux-based virtualization stacks, notably KVM/QEMU, and is embraced by other operating systems and hypervisors as a standard virtualization I/O interface. It is valued for reducing virtualization overhead, enabling multi-queue I/O, and simplifying driver portability across different hypervisor implementations.

Overall, virtio-based systems rely on a lightweight, extensible interface that separates device emulation from the guest kernel, enabling efficient, flexible I/O in virtualized environments.