Live data from Hacker News

QEMU 6.0

qemu.org

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: QEMU 6.0

#71
post #45

Is there any screenshots of the QEMU GUI running? I'm thinking of using it, but I am aghast that there's no screenshots page on the website. Also: how do you pass files into QEMU? Does it have software similar to Virtualbox's 'guest additions' software?

You're being unfairly downvoted, so allow me to actually answer your first question. QEMU doesn't have much of a GUI to speak of. It's a virtualization framework with some CLI tooling on top of it. Frontends/management UI's/etc are left as an exercise to the community so you can find one that suits your needs. For example, a popular one for macOS these days is UTM: https://mac.getutm.app QtEmu is another: https://qte…

A recent Windows build used GTK3 decorations; I was very surprised to see that appear. You are right that it is quite low on functionality, its menu allows powering off and rebooting the VM, and gives access to the serial console as well as a command-line interface for the emulator.

Re: QEMU 6.0

#72
post #37
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSO is Total Store Ordering, which refers to the memory model of x86_64. For Rosetta 2, Apple will switch the M1 processor's memory model when emulating x86_64.

Does this mean you can run an x86 VM faster than a snails pace? I tried an WinXP VM on my M1 Air just for fun but got the performance of an early Pentium. I know emulation is slow but was hoping for a little more.

[deleted]

Re: QEMU 6.0

#74
post #14

Semi-related question... I recently spent an evening trying to familiarize myself with virtualization tooling and my initial impression was that the CLI experience for kvm and hyper-v was rather clunky compared to let's say docker, gcloud, ignite and kubectl. Also a lot of the learning material seems to be oriented towards GUI. It could be that I just haven't spent enough time with kvm and hyper-v. I've spent a LOT o…

For hyper-v you can use PowerShell to manage VM's, see the details here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-w...

I use Hyper-v for years and I rarely create new VMs, this is why I use GUI, it is convenient if you don't do this often enough to remember the syntax and params. Most people that I know are in the same boat, but for mass deployments or automated deployments PowerShell is the way to go.

Re: QEMU 6.0

#75
I have heard about QEMU for years. Something about virtualization and Linux, this is what I've started to associate it to.

My Workstation runs on Windows, and up until some years ago I was using VMware Workstation for virtualization, and then moved over to VirtualBox, which I've also started to use on a Windows-based home server. I've always used both of them via the GUI.

Now, if I want to build a beefy Linux server (headless) and run some virtualization on it, would I then use QEMU and get the same thing I've been getting with VirtualBox on Windows?

How do both of these compare performance- and feature-wise? Are they alternatives, or do they server different purposes?

Re: QEMU 6.0

#76

Alright HN, I need your help. Sorry for the approximative English, I'm losing my vocabulary with WFH and I'm pretty sleep-deprived. I've been building a game streaming platform for influencers for the past months. We scaled to 9k users in a month. We have android x86 running on QEMU-KVM and there are a bunch of issues I need to address. - virsh (and virt-manager) always add a PS2 mouse to the guest. The issue is PS2…

For the PS2 mouse, you can add a USB controller (best is XHCI, as it's more friendly to virtualization and needs little or no CPU usage in the host) and an emulated USB tablet. You can also use the virtio-tablet device if your VM has drivers for it.

Hosting ARM is possible but performance will be ~10 times worse.

Re: QEMU 6.0

#77
post #75

I have heard about QEMU for years. Something about virtualization and Linux, this is what I've started to associate it to. My Workstation runs on Windows, and up until some years ago I was using VMware Workstation for virtualization, and then moved over to VirtualBox, which I've also started to use on a Windows-based home server. I've always used both of them via the GUI. Now, if I want to build a beefy Linux server…

You should look into Proxmox PVE.

It offers a nice Web UI for QEMU and LXC and makes the whole experience quite good.

I came from VirtualBox too and never looked back.

Re: QEMU 6.0

#78
It's been probably about 8 years or so since I touched QEMU, but at the time the performance was unusable (on a modest system) compared to a very usable virtualbox or vmware. IIRC, I was just trying to run win XP on Windows 7.

How do things stand these days?

Also, given that QEMU is somewhat platform independent, how well does it run an x86 OS on top of an ARM chip?

Re: QEMU 6.0

#79
post #75

I have heard about QEMU for years. Something about virtualization and Linux, this is what I've started to associate it to. My Workstation runs on Windows, and up until some years ago I was using VMware Workstation for virtualization, and then moved over to VirtualBox, which I've also started to use on a Windows-based home server. I've always used both of them via the GUI. Now, if I want to build a beefy Linux server…

Qemu is a whole-system or CPU emulator, originally for x86 PCs but now encompassing other systems and architectures.

Where the virtualization bit comes in is with kvm. Kvm is a Linux kernel module that lets you take advantage of x86 CPU hardware virtualization. Qemu can use kvm to provide the virtual CPU while it itself emulates the rest of the PC hardware, resulting in a complete virtual system.

That said, qemu can also emulate the CPU itself, allowing for example an x86 OS to run on an ARM system, or vice versa, but that of course is slower.

Re: QEMU 6.0

#80

Is there any screenshots of the QEMU GUI running? I'm thinking of using it, but I am aghast that there's no screenshots page on the website. Also: how do you pass files into QEMU? Does it have software similar to Virtualbox's 'guest additions' software?

QEMU does have a quite primitive GUI while it's running that lets you change disks and so on. But really, it's not a graphical emulator. You specify everything via command-line switches. (They're fairly intuitive, mind you. “-hda drive-c.img -m 16 -cpu 486 -soundhw sb16,adlib -vga cirrus” does what it sounds like.)

There are of course tools that provide a friendlier GUI wrapper if the command-line isn't your thing.

Post reply on HN