# VirtIO Devices

VirtIO devices are paravirtualized devices designed to be efficient to emulate and virtualize. Unless you are specifically trying to exercise a driver for some particular hardware they are the recommended device models to use for virtual machines.

The VirtIO specification is an open standard managed by OASIS. It describes how a driver in a guest operating system interacts with the device model provided by QEMU. Multiple Operating Systems support drivers for VirtIO with Linux perhaps having the widest range of device types supported.

The device implementation can either be provided wholly by QEMU, or in concert with the kernel (known as vhost). The device implementation can also be off-loaded to an external process via vhost user.

- VirtIO GPU
- VirtIO Persistent Memory
- VirtIO Sound
- vhost-user back ends
- vhost-user daemons in contrib