virtio: Towards a De-Facto Standard For Virtual I/O Devices

Summary

VirtIO is an abstraction layer over virtual I/O devices in Linux, providing a common and efficient interface to handle block, network, and other I/O operations with guests in a standardized way.

Outline

• VirtIO: The Three Goal

  • Driver Unification
  • Common ABI for general publication and use of buffers
  • Complete ABI implementations

• The configuration operations

  • Reading and writing feature bits
  • Accessing the configuration space
  • Managing the status bits
  • Performing a device reset

• Host-Guest Transport

  • Abstraction: Virtqueues
  • Implementation: VirtIO_Ring

• Current VirtIO Drivers

  • VirtIO-Block
  • VirtIO-Net

My understanding