The interesting name QEMU is the name of the open source software designed to fully emulate a personal computer.
We are not exaggerating at all if we say that virtualization technology is in great demand nowadays. If you enter the word "virtualization" into one of the search engines, the output will be more than 20 million results. Despite this, there are still unoccupied niches on the huge virtualization market. QEMU is not on the front page of the news, but it is one of the most interesting virtualization programs. If you're interested in virtualization and you're interested in the software we're describing, try QEMU in action.
This program was developed by a programmer from France, Fabrice Bellard, who previously created the famous libavcodec library, which is used by famous programs such as ffdshow, FFmpeg, VideoLAN, Mplayer and others.
Apart from the processor, QEMU allows to emulate a comprehensive number of subsystems such as video cards and network cards. Emulation of more advanced things such as symmetric multiprocessor systems with a total number of 255 chips and other processor architectures (ARM, PowerPC) is also available.
What can emulate QEMU:
- Intel x86 processors (80386/486, Pentium (Pro), AMD64);
- x86-compatible CPUs such as ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, m68k (partly), SPARC64;
- I/O devices.
Supported platforms include Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Syllable, FreeDOS, QNX, MAC OS X, Android and others.
At the moment, we are working on functionality that supports hardware virtualization (Intel VT, AMD SVM). Development was initially done as part of the Linux KVM project, but recently a joint decision was made by the developers to integrate KVM support into QEMU (mainline).
