Repository files navigation

QEMU is a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator andvirtualizer.

QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without anyneed for hardware virtualization support. By using dynamic translation,it achieves very good performance. QEMU can also integrate with the Xenand KVM hypervisors to provide emulated hardware while allowing thehypervisor to manage the CPU. With hypervisor support, QEMU can achievenear native performance for CPUs. When QEMU emulates CPUs directly it iscapable of running operating systems made for one machine (e.g. an ARMv7board) on a different machine (e.g. an x86_64 PC board).

QEMU is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linuxand BSD kernel interfaces. This allows binaries compiled against onearchitecture ABI (e.g. the Linux PPC64 ABI) to be run on a host using adifferent architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux x86_64 ABI). This does notinvolve any hardware emulation, simply CPU and syscall emulation.

QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directlyby users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings.It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level managementlayers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API.It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when usingopen source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager.

QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License,version 2. For full licensing details, consult the LICENSE file.

Documentation can be found hosted online athttps://www.qemu.org/documentation/. The documentation for thecurrent development version that is available athttps://www.qemu.org/docs/master/ is generated from thedocs/folder in the source tree, and is built bySphinx.

QEMU is multi-platform software intended to be buildable on all modernLinux platforms, OS-X, Win32 (via the Mingw64 toolchain) and a varietyof other UNIX targets. The simple steps to build QEMU are:

mkdir buildcd build../configuremake

Additional information can also be found online via the QEMU website:

• https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Linux
• https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac
• https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/W32

The QEMU source code is maintained under the GIT version control system.

git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu.git

When submitting patches, one common approach is to use 'gitformat-patch' and/or 'git send-email' to format & send the mail to theqemu-devel@nongnu.org mailing list. All patches submitted must containa 'Signed-off-by' line from the author. Patches should follow theguidelines set out in thestyle section ofthe Developers Guide.

Additional information on submitting patches can be found online viathe QEMU website

• https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch
• https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/TrivialPatches

The QEMU website is also maintained under source control.

git clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu-web.git

• https://www.qemu.org/2017/02/04/the-new-qemu-website-is-up/

A 'git-publish' utility was created to make above process lesscumbersome, and is highly recommended for making regular contributions,or even just for sending consecutive patch series revisions. It alsorequires a working 'git send-email' setup, and by default doesn'tautomate everything, so you may want to go through the above stepsmanually for once.

For installation instructions, please go to

• https://github.com/stefanha/git-publish

The workflow with 'git-publish' is:

$ git checkout master -b my-feature$# work on new commits, add your 'Signed-off-by' lines to each$ git publish

Your patch series will be sent and tagged as my-feature-v1 if you need to referback to it in the future.

Sending v2:

$ git checkout my-feature# same topic branch$# making changes to the commits (using 'git rebase', for example)$ git publish

Your patch series will be sent with 'v2' tag in the subject and the git tipwill be tagged as my-feature-v2.

The QEMU project uses GitLab issues to track bugs. Bugsfound when running code built from QEMU git or upstream released sourcesshould be reported via:

• https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues

If using QEMU via an operating system vendor pre-built binary package, itis preferable to report bugs to the vendor's own bug tracker first. Ifthe bug is also known to affect latest upstream code, it can also bereported via GitLab.

For additional information on bug reporting consult:

• https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/ReportABug

For version history and release notes, please visithttps://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/ or look at the git history formore detailed information.

The QEMU community can be contacted in a number of ways, with the twomain methods being email and IRC

• mailto:qemu-devel@nongnu.org
• https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
• #qemu on irc.oftc.net

Information on additional methods of contacting the community can befound online via the QEMU website:

• https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/StartHere