AQEMU

AQEMU

AQEMU is an open-source emulator for running guest operating systems in virtual machines on Windows, Linux and macOS hosts. It emulates processors and provides virtualized hardware to enable virtual machines to function.
AQEMU image
virtualization emulator open-source

AQEMU: Open-Source Emulator

Emulate guest operating systems in virtual machines on Windows, Linux, and macOS hosts with AQEMU, an open-source emulator that provides virtualized hardware and processor emulation.

What is AQEMU?

AQEMU is an open-source machine emulator and virtualizer. It can emulate a variety of guest hardware platforms and allows you to run operating systems and software within virtual machines on your existing host operating system.

Some key features of AQEMU include:

  • Processor emulation including x86, ARM, SPARC and PowerPC architectures
  • Virtualized hardware like graphics cards, network cards, hard drives, USB devices etc.
  • Support for virtual machine acceleration using KVM, HAXM, WHPX or Hyper-V on supported host systems
  • Flexible configuration of virtual hardware resources like CPU cores, RAM, storage etc.
  • Command line and graphical user interfaces to manage virtual machines
  • Support for a wide variety of guest operating systems including Linux, Windows and BSD platforms
  • Active open source development community

AQEMU requires an existing host operating system like Linux, Windows or macOS to install and run on. It launches guest VMs as processes within the host OS and leverages virtualization extensions on modern hardware for efficiency. The free and open source nature makes it popular for server virtualization, platform testing, malware analysis and more.

AQEMU Features

Features

  1. Full system emulation for multiple guest operating systems
  2. Emulation of common hardware like hard drives, NICs, graphics adapters
  3. Snapshots allow saving and restoring VM state
  4. Dynamic translation for reasonable performance
  5. CLI and GUI interfaces

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Free and open source

Cross-platform support

Mature and stable product

Good performance

Supports many guest OSes

Cons

Can be resource intensive

Steep learning curve

Limited features compared to paid solutions

Lacks some virtualization features like live migration


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