About QEMU
House: KVM is like the developer who builds the house but doesn’t do the interior design, while QEMU is like the interior design company that may not build the house well but does an excellent job with the décor. Thus, we use KVM to build the house (hardware virtualization, simulating CPU and memory resources) and QEMU for decoration (software emulation, simulating network cards, graphics cards, storage controllers, and hard disks). A QEMU virtual machine is a pure software implementation that can run independently without the KVM module, but its performance is lower. QEMU provides a full set of virtualization features, including processor virtualization, memory virtualization, and I/O device virtualization. QEMU is a user-space process that must call the functionality provided by KVM via a specific interface. From QEMU’s perspective, during the VM's operation, QEMU uses system call interfaces provided by KVM to configure the kernel, and KVM is responsible for running the VM in a special mode on the processor. KVM only simulates CPU and memory, meaning that a guest operating system can run on the host, but you cannot see or interact with it. So, someone modified the QEMU code, replacing its CPU and memory emulation with KVM, while leaving the network card, display, etc., to QEMU. Hence, QEMU + KVM together form a complete virtualization platform. KVM is just a kernel module, and users cannot interact with the kernel module directly. They need to use user-space management tools, and QEMU is one of these tools. KVM and QEMU complement each other; QEMU achieves hardware virtualization speed through KVM, and KVM relies on QEMU to emulate devices. For KVM, other user-space tools exist, such as libvirt, virsh, and virt-manager developed by RedHat, and QEMU is not the only option. So, the simple and direct understanding is: QEMU is a
Key features of the QEMU that are enabled through these drivers include:
- QEMU Manager -QEMU Manager( ) v7.0 -
- qemus/qemu: QEMU in a Docker container. - GitHub
- qemu/docs/tools/qemu-img.rst at master qemu/qemu - GitHub
- GitHub - qemu/qemu: Official QEMU mirror. Please
- cqu611/qemu-ufs: Qemu-ufs devel. based on qemu
- GitHub - qemu/qemu: Official QEMU mirror. Please see
- qemu-nvme_lightnvm/qemu-options.hx at master BaiShuhan/qemu-nvme_lightnvm
IntroductionThe aim is to get Kali Linux running on an Apple M1 Macbook Air with QEMU with a reasonable level of performance. The performance part is a work in progress. I'm currently tweaking the QEMU startup command, experimenting with different parameters.StepsInstall QEMUQEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer ( Since VirtualBox doesn't suport Apple M1, QEMU is increasingly becoming a go-to option for running other operating system UIs.Let's install QEMU using Homebrew.brew install qemuDownload Kali Linux 64-bit installation imageGo to the installer that matches your need from the 64-bit section.Why x86 64-bit and not the Apple M1 installer?! Because I was not able to get the Kali Linux Applie M1 installer running using QEMU. That's why! :)Create a directory for your installation and initialise a QEMU virtual vard diskmkdir qemu-m1-kalilinucd qemu-m1-kalilinuqemu-img create -f qcow2 kali.qcow2 30GCopy the Kali Linux 64-bit installation image to the same dorectoryStart QEMU with the Kali installer mounted as a CD ROMqemu-system-x86_64 -hda kali.qcow2 -boot d -cdrom kali-linux-2022.3-installer-amd64.iso -m 2G -usb -machine pcThis will launch a QEMU window to kickoff your Kali Linux installation. Step through the installation wizard. Depending on the installation contents you can expect this to take hours to complete.Once the installation completes the system will reboot. Since you still have the installation cd-rom image mounted, you will come back to the start of the installation wizard after rebooting. Please quit QEMU at this point.Launch your Kali Linux installationqemu-system-x86_64 -hda kali.qcow2 -boot d -m 2G -usb -machine q35 -cpu
