The following pages describe the following:
What's new with QEMU?
What is QEMU?
QEMU is a processor emulator. It emulates the guest HW
by dynamically examining the code that is to be run in
the Virtual Machine, and translating it to the host
instructions. Rough estimations say that an software
emulated guest is between 5-10% speed of the host.
For i386/x86-64, there is a kernel accelerator module,
which allows i386/x86-64 code to run untranslated on
the processor, making the speed of the guest something
like 30-50% of the host speed. It's very dependent on
much of the code can run native on the processor.
A couple of months ago, the author started working on a new
code generator called "TCG - The Code Generator", which is to
replace the old Dyngen version which pretty much required
gcc-3.4.x. Not all of the processors that are emulated with
QEMU have been ported to TCG, which means if you need alpha
or hppx support, you may have to continue compiling with
gcc-3.4.x. With luck, and some testing, gcc4 and Studio 12
may be able to be used to compile QEMU.
Additionally, at the beginning of June, he also upgraded
the kernel kqemu module to 1.0.4pre1 which is supposed to
be able to run 32-bit VM's on a 64-bit host.
That module has been ported, but there is a caveat - at
some point between allocating 1.0G and 1.5GB of RAM, the
VM running with the KQEMU module enable may spontaneously
panic the guest and cause QEMU to abort. We are working
on the issue.
QEMU/KQEMU has also been testing on OpenSolaris (OS200805)
1) which versions of GCC can compile QEMU 0.9.x with the
dyngen code generator (pre June 2, 2008 Code)
2) Long dependency description of additional software you might
need to compile QEMU with all the features
3) Building QEMU 0.9.x on Solaris 10 or SXCE
4) Building QEMU 0.9,x on Open Solaris (OS200805)