Chapter 11. Overview

QEMU is a fast, cross-platform opensource machine emulator which can emulate a huge number of hardware architectures for you. QEMU supports two basic operation modes: with full system virtualization you can run a complete unmodified operating system (VM Guest) on top of your existing system (VM Host Server), while user mode emulation lets you run a single Linux process compiled for one CPU on another CPU.

You can also use QEMU for debugging purposes - you can easily stop your running virtual machine and then inspect its state, save and restore it later.

QEMU consists of the following parts:

As a virtualization solution, QEMU can be run either under the Xen hypervisor, or together with the KVM kernel module. If the VM Guest architecture is the same as that of VM Host Server, QEMU can take advantage of the KVM acceleration.