Page "Device driver" Paragraph 36

Virtual device drivers represent a particular variant of device drivers.

They are used to emulate a hardware device, particularly in virtualization environments, for example when a DOS program is run on a Microsoft Windows computer or when a guest operating system is run on, for example, a Xen host.

Instead of enabling the guest operating system to dialog with hardware, virtual device drivers take the opposite role and emulate a piece of hardware, so that the guest operating system and its drivers running inside a virtual machine can have the illusion of accessing real hardware.

Attempts by the guest operating system to access the hardware are routed to the virtual device driver in the host operating system as e. g. function calls.

The virtual device driver can also send simulated processor-level events like interrupts into the virtual machine.