IT lexicon Infra & Ops QEMU

QEMU

Infra & Ops På svenska → Updated: 2026-07-28
More info
Creator
Fabrice Bellard
Released
Type
Emulator / hypervisor
License
GPL-2.0
Website

Free machine emulator that can both simulate foreign processor architectures and, paired with KVM, run virtual machines at full speed.

Fabrice Bellard released it in 2003. Two modes: pure emulation via TCG, which translates guest instructions into host instructions and can therefore run ARM code on x86, or acceleration via KVM, where guest code runs directly on the CPU and QEMU only emulates the peripherals.

Practically all Linux virtualisation stands on QEMU — OpenStack, Proxmox, oVirt and libvirt are layers above it. So is Android's emulator, and a large share of all embedded development.

← Back to the lexicon