If you have been using QEMU for emulating other operating systems, you will find that it runs fairly slow. On average, QEMU will only run at about 20% of the speed of your host system. Obviously, this is a problem.

How to try a full ARM Debian system complete of graphical environment, using prepared images for the Versatile platform.

How to compile a vanilla Linux kernel for the Versatile ARM platform, and run it using QEMU.

Create a simple "Hello world" program that prints on the serial port of an emulated ARM system, using the CodeSourcery gcc toolchain and the QEMU emulator of the Versatile board.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

"...The method which finally worked was to download a prepared QEMU image and run GNU from QEMU. The image I used can be found here. [...] Now I'm up and running it's time to do some exploring. I will report back soon with my first impressions."

This week there was the release of QEMU 0.12.2 (and the subsequent release of KVM-QEMU 0.12.2) with support for block migration, but this point release was mostly made up of small fixes and tweaks. IBM's Anthony Liguori though has begun making plans for the next major release of this open-source processor emulator.

Instructions to compile and run the U-Boot bootloader inside a QEMU emulation of an ARM platform.

We're going to deliberately sidestep the jargon and the hype to take a practical look at the virtualisation technologies in Ubuntu, in particular KVM and Qemu and the related userspace tools that create and manage virtual machines. Although the discussion centres on Ubuntu, the technology is applicable to all Linux distros.