QEMU Reviews & Product Details

The experience of using QEMU was really good especially virtualization of hardware. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It would be better if we have better documentation of QEMU Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The commands to configure were easy to understand, documentation was good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Didn't find any downside. Mostly used QEMU for virtual machine creation and it was pretty seamless to use. Would have liked better collaboration with kubernetes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have used QEMU since I was student and It helps me a lot to learn without having hardware. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Learning curve for QEMU is somewhat difficult. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the community support, ease of use, CLI and GUI both Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

documentation USED TO BE weak point but is now improving Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Qemu support various arch like ARM , It is useful for Tizen developers.

However, if you would like to hack on Tizen on ARM, you’re able to do this now with or without any ARM Hardware.

First install qemu-system-arm on your system (on debian family : sudo apt-get install qemu-system-arm ), then create or download armv7l disk image (tizen-common-wayland-arm-sunxi-20140527rzr.raw will also work). Since we wont boot on the image a kernel is needed just rebuild it or download it from upper link (vexpress has best support AFAIK)...

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Unfortunately QEmu and 3D Hw acceleration is not yet supported, qemu-yagl might be an alternative to consider, Tizen project is using the later one as emulator. An UI that mimic virtualbox could be a good improvement for reaching more users and help migration of some of them.

Some vdi files can not be converted to qcow2 files? It would be also helpful to be able to split qcow2 files in smaller chucks and let QEmu merge them on the fly, similarly to vbox. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. QEMU is good at device emulation and has various platforms which is perfect for development or testing on different platforms.

2. QEMU's documentation is quite helpful and it is easy to use with just few lines of command lines.

3. With KVM, QEMU is so efficient that you can even expect native experience from it.

4. As an open source software, its community is active and friendly. Thanks to engineers in QEMU community for introducing me to open source world. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wonder if there are some GUI frontend for QEMU? It is a little hard for normal user to use with just command line. However, using Boxes in Fedora, it is handy to create and run a virtual machine. So maybe the community should introduce some helpful tools on the website. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

QEMU is an emulator and virtualization machine that allows you to run a complete operating system as just another task on your desktop. It can be very useful for trying out different operating systems, testing software, and running applications that won't run on your desktop's native platform.

QEMU runs on x86 systems running Linux, Microsoft Windows, and some UNIX platforms, and can host target systems from a range of different microprocessors as detailed on the QEMU website.

QEMU has the advantage of being able to run either as a pure emulator or as a native virtual machine (on x86 / x86-64 hardware). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Need KVM to lifting speed.

Inadequate support for Microsoft Windows and some host operating systems (some analog of the system can only run).

Not perfect to support unusual architecture.

Difficult to install and use than other simulation software Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Qemu offers variety of architectures and platforms for emulation and it just works out of the box. One can run it on all major OSes ie, (windows, linux and Mac OS X) which makes it very popular irrespective of different OS users. One of key reason why it is one of the best emulation tool is that it achieves near native performance and it allows users to compare results without having to verify it on actual platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being an open source software, it doesn't have fancy UI and most of the work / parameters are passed as a command line. It could be very confusing for the first time users, specially ones without having prior command line experience. I have struggled myself quite a bit when I was introduced to Qemu. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The thing about QEMU is that it has so many things to like!

First of all, it emulates pretty much any CPU you can think of. x86, ARM, PowerPC, and even some obscure RISC chips and custom chips. CPU emulation is stable for all platforms you can run QEMU on, and most systems run flawlessly.

Operating system support is fantastic as well, with Windows, Linux, and even Mac running fairly well. Other systems, like Unix and OS/2 and the like, run great as well. Especially considering that before QEMU you couldn't really run any of those systems well on Windows or Linux.

QEMU on Linux can run Windows at near native performance with VFIO, KVM, and a few other technologies switched on. If your CPU supports hardware virtualization, expect at least 95% of performance consistently.

QEMU can not only virtualize environments, but can also do things that make using QEMU easy for beginners, things like hard drive image creation and disc image creation. There are probably 1,000 reasons to use QEMU (like Xbox support with XQEMU), but for now I will just say it is probably the best system virtualization package available at the moment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only real complaints about QEMU that I can think of are all related to the Windows version.

First, there is no GUI that comes with QEMU on any system you run it on. This means if you want to simply emulate or virtualize something real quick to show a friend, or if you are a less tech savvy person, you may not have an easy time using this software.

Another issue is that KVM and VFIO don't have support on Windows. This slows down the Windows version considerably, and while you can still use most systems fine, Windows 10 or Mac OS X 10.10 will run fairly slow.

Speaking of Mac OS X, it has some problems as well. Running Mac OS X on any virtualization or emulation platform is difficult regardless, but due to the measurements Apple has taken to fight piracy, and lock it's operating system to just Mac owners, this makes it extremely difficult to run properly on QEMU. However, I would think QEMU and VirtualBox should both be able to run the operating system by now, since Mac OS has been standardized in terms of hardware and simplified in terms of software. Emulating hardware is difficult though, so I don't necessarily blame the developers so much as I blame the lack of effort on Apple to provide support for emulation and virtualization to their platform so that developers and testers can run tests quickly and make sure Apple support is finalized before the next release.

In addition, the GUI's that are available for QEMU are either outdated, don't allow use of all of QEMU's features, or are extremely difficult to look at or understand. This wouldn't be a problem with the original team normally, but I think QEMU really deserves a GUI. VirtualBox, VMware, Bochs, and PCem all have great GUI's. So I think a GUI in Qt or WxWidgets or something would really benefit this application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I am using Qemu in Linux systems and I have to state that I am really satisfied by it's user-friendliness (talking only about Linux users, I have no feedback for other systems). Besides that I find Qemu very reliable and robust. Supporting many platform backends is also a big pro when it comes to embedded applications. Last but not least I find it's open-source nature very attractive both because I can hack some of it's code and create a custom solution for a problem and because of it's big community. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One downside of Qemu is it's performance in speed. Some more effort could be placed in this subject. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.