I mean, virtualenv is not supposed to interact with that at all. System libraries are systems' package manager responsibility. Doubly so, as - as I get it - all this stuff is directly tied to the kernel driver.

What Python's package manager (pip in virtualenv) should do is build (or download prebuilt binaries) the relevant bindings and that's the extent of it. If others say it works this way with C (that comment about cmake and pkgconfig), then it must work this way with Python too.