while you are correct in calling the VM startup slow compared to the container startup, reading "emulating hardware" burns my eyes modern VMs don't emulate har

while you are correct in calling the VM startup slow compared to the container startup, reading "emulating hardware" burns my eyes modern VMs don't emulate hardware. When a VM has a hard drive or a network device there's no sophisticated code to trick VM into believing that this is real hardware. Virtio drivers are about VM writing data in a memory area and assuming it's written to the disk / sent to the network (because in the background hypervisor reads the same memory area and does the job)