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I've heared that hosted VMs make I/O virtualization easier. Because no device driver is needed for the VM and it can use the host OS device drivers for devices. My question is if the device driver is installed on the guest OS why do we need to use device drivers of the host OS? Thanks in advance! :D

user1284064
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Depending of your virtualization solution some devices of the virtual machine are virtual (for example, hard disk) while other not (for example processor), for the virtualizated devices, they're generic enought so they may not need drivers (but VM tools contains drivers that make them perform better), but at the end Virtual Machines are running on top of the host operating system, so this operating system, need to have drivers for all the real hardware, to be able to provide that hardware to the virtual machine.

Rafael
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  • Let me make the question clearer. I want to know the reason why I/O virtualization in hosted VMs is more convenient. Many references say this is because no device driver is needed in hosted VMs. I guess it is for the case where the virtual device and the real device are not similar. In this case virtualization can not be performed at the ISA level. So it is performed at higher levels which are device independent. For example at the system call level. The VMM converts this call to the appropriate call for the host OS and .... Please tell me if I'm right or not! Thanks! :D – user1284064 Aug 31 '12 at 19:37