MACHINE EMULATOR Qemu
Version: 7.2.0 Web: www.qemu.org
QEMU (Quick EMUlator) is one of the oldest virtualisation apps that’s been helping desktop users get a taste of virtualisation since the turn of the century. Although it works much like other popular virtualisation apps, QEMU does have several features that you won’t find in its competitors. QEMU is bundled in the official repos of pretty much every distro. Users of DEB-based distros like Ubuntu can grab it with sudo apt install qemu , while users of RPM-based distros like Fedora can use the sudo dnf install qemu command.
QEMU supports many options for launching the guest system, including multiprocessor emulation on single-processor systems. The open source software can also emulate other processor architectures such as PowerPC, ARM, RISC and more. Besides its impressive hardware virtualisation features, QEMU can also do user-mode emulation to run apps created for one platform on an entirely different one.
The app is essentially a command-line utility and a typical install dumps a huge subset of qemu- prefixed tools for emulating different architectures. Frontends like Qemu Launcher and Aqemu provide a GUI to many of QEMU’s advanced options.
QEMU VMs can interface with many types of physical hardware on the host, including audio interfaces and all types of USB devices. You can save and restore QEMU VMs without any issues. By default, QEMU does its emulation in software, which makes it extremely slow. These days, QEMU
is mostly used in collaboration with KVM kernel components, where it uses the virtualisation extensions built into the processor (Intel VT or AMDV) to virtualise guests at near native speeds. For what it’s worth, KVM started out as a fork of QEMU,
named qemu-kvm. However, this was merged into
QEMU upstream and the fork was discontinued.