Get QEMU running

To get QEMU running, take the following steps:

  1. Download the Debian minimal boot CD-ROM
  2. Download the qemu archive and the kqemu archive from http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/
  3. Unpack the qemu archive, cd into the directory
  4. Unpack the kqemu archive
  5. To install in /opt, type: ./configure --prefix=/opt/qemu --interp-prefix=/opt/qemu/interp
  6. To compile: make
  7. To install: make install (as root)
  8. Manually install the kernel module: cp kqemu/kqemu.ko /opt/qemu/bin
  9. Add the following three lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
   mknod /dev/kqemu c 250 0
   chmod 666 /dev/kqemu
   insmod /opt/qemu/bin/kqemu.ko
  1. Create a disk image:
    qemu-img create -f qcow deb.img 4G
  2. Boot from the CD and install Debian:
    qemu -user-net -boot d -cdrom sarge-i386-netinst.iso deb.img
  3. When installation is done, close the window and start again:
    qemu -user-net deb.img

See also here:

Benchmark results

I ran the BYTEmark benchmark on a Windows 2000 Professional guest inside QEMU on a Linux host. I tested the Linux host with nbench.

Native Linux nbench results
Numeric sort 846.24
String sort 120.44
Bitfield 329,050,000
FP Emulation 79.248
Windows 2000 Pro guest in QEMU 0.7.0
Numeric sort 637.920796
String sort 73.396653
Bitfield 192,019,081.405118
FP Emulation 79.248