The driver residing within the virtual machine. It publishes I/O requests into shared memory areas.
The Virtio architecture consists of two primary components: the Virtio driver and the Virtio device. The Virtio driver is a software component that runs within the guest operating system and provides a standardized interface for accessing virtualized devices. The Virtio device, on the other hand, is a software or hardware component that emulates a physical device and provides the actual functionality. virtio
Virtio is no longer tied to QEMU: