Running virtual machines with qemu-system-*

In this recipe, we are going to demonstrate how to start virtual machines with QEMU. QEMU provides binaries that can emulate different CPU architectures using either custom or prebuilt images for the guest OS.

If you completed the Installing and configuring QEMU recipe, you should have a host that contains the following binaries:

root@kvm:~# ls -la /usr/bin/qemu-system-*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8868848 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-aarch64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7020544 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-alpha
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8700784 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-arm
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3671488 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-cris
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8363680 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-i386
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3636640 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-lm32
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6982528 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-m68k
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3652224 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-microblaze
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3652224 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-microblazeel
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8132992 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-mips
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8356672 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-mips64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8374336 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-mips64el
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8128896 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-mipsel
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3578592 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-moxie
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3570848 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-or32
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8701760 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9048000 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-ppc64le -> qemu-system-ppc64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8463680 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-ppcemb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6894528 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-sh4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6898624 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-sh4eb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4032000 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-sparc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7201696 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-sparc64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3704704 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-tricore
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3554912 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-unicore32
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8418656 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3653024 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-xtensa
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3642752 Jan 25 12:49 /usr/bin/qemu-system-xtensaeb
root@kvm:~#

Each command can start a QEMU-emulated instance for the specific CPU architecture. For this recipe, we are going to be using the qemu-system-x86_64 utility.