QEMU

Quick Emulator

Developer(s)	Fabrice Bellard et al.
Latest version	9.1.0 [+]
Active	Yes
Platform(s)	Windows Linux macOS Android (port)
Architecture(s)	x86_64, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, Itanium
Type	Hypervisor
Emulates	x86 CPUs Various PowerPC machines Various ARM devices SPARC MicroBlaze LatticeMico32 CRIS OpenRISC
Programmed in	C
Website	qemu.org
Support ($)	PayPal
Source code	Official repository GitHub mirror

QEMU (an acronym for Quick Emulator) is a general-purpose computer emulator and hypervisor originally developed by Fabrice Bellard in 2003. It emulates a wide range of architectures beyond x86, and has been used in Android emulation both officially and unofficially; it's also well-known in the server industry for its handling of virtual machines using KVM (and more recently libvirt), and is the choice of the VFIO community (running Windows in a virtual machine with a dedicated graphics card for gaming). QEMU is also the first project to implement usermode emulation on Linux, which allows one architecture to run software for another as if it were native.

Download

	Recommended Builds Stable/Distro-dependent
	32-bit and 64-bit Builds Compiled by Stefan Weil
	Limbo Port Based on QEMU 5.1.0
	qemu Package Listing at pkgs.org

Overview

QEMU can act as an emulator for multiple architectures, or as a hypervisor if running an x86 guest on an x86 host. As a hypervisor, it can utilize KVM on Linux or Intel HAXM on Windows for hardware acceleration of virtual machines, which can result in near-native performance. As an emulator, it uses dynamic recompilers, which makes it much faster than Bochs. Its maturity and performance have resulted in it being used as a basis for emulators for the Xbox, PS4, and iOS. QEMU completely lacks a GUI and must be run from the command-line. The official QEMU wiki includes links to various dedicated frontends such as Gnome Boxes, including those for Windows users such as QTemu. Linux users may prefer to instead use a virtual machine management system such as virt-manager that controls QEMU/KVM.

UTM

UTM is a frontend for virtual machines running on macOS (x86_64 and Apple Silicon) and iOS. It is built on QEMU and Apple's own virtualization framework (the latter only on Apple Silicon Macs). It's capable of both emulation as well as virtualizing operating systems that run on the same architecture as the host. UTM SE ("slow edition", for iOS devices that haven't been jailbroken) version uses a threaded interpreter which performs better than a traditional interpreter but still slower than JIT used on macOS and jailbroken iOS devices.[1]

External links

• QEMU Wiki Documentation
• Wiki (Platforms available in QEMU)