Introduction

Quick Emulator (QEMU) is the main component of the QEMU/KVM virtualization technology suit. It provides hardware virtualization and processor emulation. QEMU runs in userspace and, without the need for kernel, drivers can still provide fast system emulation. QEMU supports two operating modes:

• Full system emulation, where QEMU emulates an entire computer system, including the CPU type and peripherals
• User mode emulation, where QEMU can run a process that has been compiled on a different CPU architecture natively

In this book, we are going to focus on full system emulation with the hardware acceleration support provided by the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

In this chapter, we will start by installing QEMU on Linux, then explore various examples of building, managing, and using disk images for the virtual instances. We will then have an in-depth look at running QEMU in full system emulation mode, using the provided binaries. We will see examples of using the KVM kernel module to accelerate the QEMU processes. Finally, we are going to end the chapter with details on how to connect to the virtual machines we started earlier, using VNC clients.