QEMU
QEMU is a popular emulation environment for Windows and
Linux. This software is a generic and open source machine emulator and
virtualizer.
This software relies on dynamic binary translation to
achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU
architectures.
Installation of QEMU under Windows is more complicated
than most of the other software we are evaluating here. Having to
resort to a command line to create a blank
disk image, and then running the software from a command prompt is
minimialistic. Users might want
to use the Qemu Manager, a separate application, to make QEMU easier to
install. Using command line parameters to create and run guest
operating systems can only be off putting to causal Windows users
thinking of giving Linux a whirl.
To launch QEMU with the installed guest operating system
(in this example, a 32bit Ubuntu 8.10 ISO image) you might type:
qemu.exe -kernel-kqemu -L . -cdrom
ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso -hda
hda.img -m 512 -boot d
To get respectable performance Qemu relies on an open
source kernel module to directly execute the code of the guest system
on the host. This kernel module is called kqemu, and it is the
-kernel-kqemu flag which
enables this full virtualization. Without using this flag, performance
is lamentable.
QEMU lacks specialist device drivers,
and running multimedia applications is not recommended. Whilst the
software is not overly full-featured or 'user friendly', it is very
flexible in use. Moreover, QEMU is
worthy of inclusion bearing in mind some of its code has been used in
other popular virtualization software, including
VirtualBox.
The two screenshots above show QEMU in action, both with
Ubuntu running a terminal emulator, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org.
Features include:
- Save and restore the state of the virtual machine
with all programs running
- Supports the emulation of various architectures,
including IA-32 (x86) PCs, AMD64 PCs, MIPS R4000, Sun's SPARC sun4m,
Sun's SPARC sun4u,
ARM development boards (Integrator/CP and Versatile/PB), SH4 SHIX
board, PowerPC (PReP and Power Macintosh), and ETRAX CRIS architectures
- Virtual hard disk images can be stored in a special
format (QCOW2) that only takes up disk space that the guest OS actually
uses
- Emulate network cards (of different models) which
share the host system's connectivity by doing network address
translation, effectively
allowing the guest to use the same network as the host.
- Integrates several services to allow the host and
guest systems to communicate, for example, a SMB server and network
port redirection (to
allow incoming connections to the virtual machine).
- Boot Linux kernels without having to prepare a
bootable image with a bootloader
- Portability; virtual machines can be run even where a
user does not have administrator rights
- Bluetooth emulation
Next
Page: Cygwin
Read ahead:
|
Bookmark with: