QEMU is a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator and virtualizer.
QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without any need for hardware virtualization support. By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance. QEMU can also integrate with the Xen and KVM hypervisors to provide emulated hardware while allowing the hypervisor to manage the CPU. With hypervisor support, QEMU can achieve near native performance for CPUs. When QEMU emulates CPUs directly it is capable of running operating systems made for one machine (e.g. an ARMv7 board) on a different machine (e.g. an x86_64 PC board).
QEMU is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux and BSD kernel interfaces. This allows binaries compiled against one architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux PPC64 ABI) to be run on a host using a different architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux x86_64 ABI). This does not involve any hardware emulation, simply CPU and syscall emulation.
QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directly by users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings. It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level management layers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API. It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when using open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager.
QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. For full licensing details, consult the LICENSE file.
All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners. All company, product and service names used in this software are for identification purposes only. Wind River and VxWorks are registered trademarks of Wind River Systems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
Disclaimer of Warranty / No Support: Wind River does not provide support and maintenance services for this software, under Wind River’s standard Software Support and Maintenance Agreement or otherwise. Unless required by applicable law, Wind River provides the software (and each contributor provides its contribution) on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties of TITLE, NONINFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You are solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using or redistributing the software and assume any risks associated with your exercise of permissions under the license.
Documentation can be found hosted online at
https://www.qemu.org/documentation/. The documentation for the
current development version that is available at
https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/ is generated from the docs/
folder in the source tree, and is built by Sphinx.
QEMU is multi-platform software intended to be buildable on all modern Linux platforms, OS-X, Win32 (via the Mingw64 toolchain) and a variety of other UNIX targets. The simple steps to build QEMU are:
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
makeAdditional information can also be found online via the QEMU website:
Please submit a pull request.
Please file an issue.
For version history and release notes, please look at the git history.
The Wind River QEMU team can be reached through