QEMU - Wikipedia
qemuemulationvirtualizationhypervisoropen-source
Abstraction: Open-source machine emulator and virtualizer supporting multiple architectures
Key points:
- QEMU is a free/open-source emulator and virtualizer originally written by Fabrice Bellard; first release 2003, written in C under GPL-2.0
- Three operating modes: user-mode emulation (single programs), system emulation (full computer including peripherals), and hypervisor support (VMM/device backend for KVM, Xen, HVF, Hyper-V, NVMM)
- Uses a JIT binary translator called the Tiny Code Generator (TCG) to emulate x86, ARM, PowerPC, RISC-V, SPARC, MIPS, and many others on any host
- Native disk image format QCOW2 supports snapshots, overlay images, compression, and encryption; only stores used space
- KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is the primary Linux hardware-assisted virtualization accelerator used with QEMU, replacing the deprecated KQEMU module
- QEMU Object Model (QOM) provides a dynamic type registration framework for device modeling
Connections: Qemu · Fabrice Bellard · Kvm · Virtualization · Emulation