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
- Source: https://github.com/chronic8000/aqemu
- Microsoft Store (7-day free trial): https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P0HGKHQ9W19?cid=devto
Issues, feedback and guest profile requests are very welcome on GitHub.
