DEV Community

Chronic Engineering
Chronic Engineering

Posted on

AQEMU - a point-and-click QEMU front-end for Windows and Linux

QEMU can emulate almost anything, but getting a guest running usually means a wall of command-line flags. AQEMU is my attempt to fix that: an open-source (GPL-2.0) Qt GUI that wraps QEMU and gives you ready-made machines instead.

What it does

  • Bundles QEMU 11, so there's nothing extra to install
  • Ships 195 ready-made guest profiles across 29 architectures: Windows 11 ARM, Windows 98, Solaris, TrueNAS, RISC-V and lots more
  • Native x64 and ARM64 builds for Windows, plus Linux builds
  • Hardware acceleration where the platform allows it: WHPX on Windows x64, KVM on Linux, with QEMU's TCG emulator as a fallback
  • An embedded VNC display, so guests run inside the app window

How it's built

AQEMU is a Qt 5 app in C++. The Windows builds use MSYS2 (GCC for x64, clang for ARM64) and are packaged as MSIX for the Microsoft Store. QEMU itself is upstream and unpatched, pulled in as a git submodule.

What's next

Hardware acceleration for ARM64 guests on Windows on Arm (via WHPX) is the next big piece of work.

Try it

Issues, feedback and guest profile requests are very welcome on GitHub.

Top comments (0)