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Article

Virtio: An I/O virtualization framework for Linux

Paravirtualized I/O with KVM and lguest

By M. Jones

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28 January 2010

Article

Time to read: 11 minutes

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- Virtio: towards a de factor standard for virtual I/O devicesOne of the best resources for deep technical details of virtio is Rusty Russell's "Virtio: towards a de factor standard for virtual I/O devices." This paper provides a very thorough treatment of virtio and its internals.
- performance advantage of virtio using KVMOne of the most important benefits of virtio is performance in paravirtualized environments. This blog post from btm.geek shows the performance advantage of virtio using KVM.
- libvirt wikiThis article touched on the intersection of libvirt (an open virtualization API) and the virtio framework. The libvirt wiki shows how to specify virtio devices in libvirt.
- lguestThis article discussed two hypervisor solutions that take advantage of the virtio framework: lguest is an x86 hypervisor, also developed by Rusty Russell, and KVM is another Linux-based hypervisor that was first built into the Linux kernel.
- KVMThis article discussed two hypervisor solutions that take advantage of the virtio framework: lguest is an x86 hypervisor, also developed by Rusty Russell, and KVM is another Linux-based hypervisor that was first built into the Linux kernel.
- shared-memory message passingOne interesting use of virtio was the development of shared-memory message passing to allow VMs to communicate with one another through the hypervisor, as described in this paper from SpringerLink.

Virtio: An I/O virtualization framework for Linux