About QEMU

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

QEMU can be used in several different ways. The most common is for :ref:System Emulation, where it provides a virtual model of an entire machine (CPU, memory and emulated devices) to run a guest OS. In this mode the CPU may be fully emulated, or it may work with a hypervisor such as KVM, Xen or Hypervisor.Framework to allow the guest to run directly on the host CPU.

The second supported way to use QEMU is :ref:User Mode Emulation, where QEMU can launch processes compiled for one CPU on another CPU. In this mode the CPU is always emulated.

QEMU also provides a number of standalone :ref:command line utilities<Tools>, such as the qemu-img disk image utility that allows you to create, convert and modify disk images.

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build-platforms emulation deprecated removed-features license