Paravirtualized drivers for kvm/Linux

Virtio was chosen to be the main platform for IO virtualization in KVM
The idea behind it is to have a common framework for hypervisors for IO virtualization
More information (although not uptodate) can be found in [AttachFile&do=get&target=kvm_pv_drv.pdf]
At the moment network/block/balloon devices are suported for kvm
The host impelementation is in userspace - qemu, so no driver is needed in the host.

How to use Virtio

Get kvm version >= 60
Get Linux kernel with virtio drivers for the guest
- Soon a link will be updated
- As an alternative one can use a standard guest kernel for the guest > 2.6.18 and make use sync backward compatibility option
Use model=virtio for the network devices.
At the moment the kernel modules are automatically loaded in the guest but the interface should be started manually (dhclient/ifconfig)