G2

Rajnesh K.

Software Engineer II

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/12/2021

"A very handy tool when it comes to emulation and development before silicon is ready."

5/5

What do you like best about QEMU?

The best thing is it's open-source and quite well maintained. It offers versatile support for different hardware emulation, and one can add support for their own hardware quite easily. As it's also used by virtualization solutions, it needs to fulfill different use cases, which has helped in the overall evolution of QEMU's design. Another good thing is the community is quite active. If you find a bug and send a patch for it, they will give it a nice review and actively work on it so that it gets submitted in time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about QEMU?

Not much to be honest. Documentation for getting started with QEMU can sometimes be a bit hard to navigate. It's not because there's a problem with it, it's mainly due to the rich feature set and tons of options. Finding the ones that you care about can be tricky sometimes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering QEMU:

I would suggest creating a simple guide yourself of the options you need and their descriptions along with some example commands to run it. It comes in handy while doing context switches, especially when you are not in touch with the work for more than 2-3 weeks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is QEMU solving and how is that benefiting you?

Once I used it to port our ARM hypervisor on RISC-V architecture. Even though the hypervisor extension for RISC-V is not released yet, because it's in the final stages, someone added QEMU support for it. So basically now we have a RISC-V hypervisor ready before even any chip is launched with that support. In short, it allowed us to get ahead by almost 1.5-2 years in the market. I also once used it to port an RTOS on RISC-V architecture. Boards are quite expensive when they are released initially. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.