Time to think more about QEMU

Quick Emulator (QEMU) was written by Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFmpeg), and is free software and mainly licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL).

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSs and programs made for one machine (for example: an ARM board) on a different machine (for example: your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance (see www.QEMU.org).

Let me rephrase the preceding paragraph and give a more specific explanation. QEMU is actually a hosted hypervisor/VMM that performs hardware virtualization. Are you confused? If yes, don't worry. You will get a better picture by the end of this chapter, especially when you go through each of the interrelated components and correlate the entire path used here to perform virtualization. QEMU can act as an Emulator or Virtualizer:

• Qemu as an Emulator: In Chapter 1, Understanding Linux Virtualization...