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QEMU

QEMU is an open source machine emulator and virtualizer. It can emulate a complete computer system, including peripherals, and allow you to launch different operating systems without rebooting your physical machine.

What is QEMU?

QEMU is a free and open source hypervisor and machine emulator. It emulates a complete computer system, including the processor, memory, storage, network interfaces and peripherals. This allows you to run software and operating systems written for one machine on a different machine.

Some key features of QEMU include:

  • Full system emulation for many processor architectures like x86, ARM, SPARC, PowerPC etc.
  • User mode emulation to run processes for foreign architectures on your operating system
  • Virtualization with support for KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi and more hypervisors
  • Ability to virtualize disks and install operating systems without reboots
  • Network emulation including virtual networks, tunnels and direct connections
  • Device emulation for hard drives, NICs, audio devices, graphics adapters etc.
  • Snapshot functionality to save and restore emulated machine states
  • Dynamic translation of guest code to optimize performance

Some common uses cases of QEMU include sandboxing foreign software, OS testing and development, server consolidation, application compatibility testing across OSes and creating virtual appliances. It can be managed via command line as well as graphical frontends like GNOME Boxes.

Official Links

Official Website
qemu.org

The Best QEMU Alternatives

Top Apps like QEMU

VirtualBox, AWS Firecracker, VMware Workstation Pro, Parallels Desktop, Limbo PC Emulator, Anbox, Windows Sandbox, Portable Virtualbox, VMware Workstation Player, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), PlayCover, QEMU Manager, OpenStack, Multipass, Bochs, UCS Virtual Machine Manager, Danube Cloud, Mojopac, JPCSIM, CoreCluster, VMLite Workstation, bhyve, GreenVBox, VirtualBuddy, box86, xhypervisor, FAUMachine, Virtual PC, GNURoot Debian, VMware Server, Parallels Workstation, VMLite XP Mode, PearPC, OpenVZ, PetiteCloud, SysInfoTools Virtual Disk Machine Recovery Tool, MokaFive Player, USBFastBoot, AtomDeploy are some alternatives to QEMU.

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