CompTIA Linux+ XK0-006 (V8) Practice Question

Paravirtualized drivers, such as those provided by the VirtIO framework, are designed for virtual environments. Unlike fully emulated drivers that mimic real hardware and require the hypervisor to translate every operation, paravirtualized drivers are aware they are running in a VM. This awareness allows them to use an optimized communication path, often called hypercalls, to interact directly with the hypervisor. This direct path significantly reduces the overhead associated with I/O operations, leading to much higher throughput and lower latency, which is ideal for performance-sensitive applications like a high-traffic database. Fully emulated drivers are slower due to the overhead of trapping and translating hardware commands. Drivers for physical hardware passthrough provide excellent performance but dedicate a physical device to a single VM, which wasn't specified as an option. Standard, unmodified guest OS drivers would typically interact with a fully emulated device, inheriting its performance penalty.