How Windows virtio drivers work

Paravirtualized drivers enhance the performance of virtual machines (VMs) by decreasing I/O latency and increasing throughput to almost bare-metal levels. You can use paravirtualized drivers for VMs that run I/O-heavy tasks and applications.

virtio drivers are KVM’s paravirtualized device drivers, available for Windows VMs running on KVM hosts. These drivers are provided by the virtio-win package, which includes drivers for:

  • Block (storage) devices
  • Network interface controllers
  • Video controllers
  • Memory ballooning device
  • Paravirtualized memory device
  • Paravirtual serial port device
  • Entropy source device
  • Paravirtual panic device
  • Input devices, such as mice, keyboards, or tablets
  • VirtIO FS Device
  • QEMU FwCfg Device
  • A small set of emulated devices

By using KVM virtio drivers, the following Microsoft Windows versions are expected to run similarly to physical systems: