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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

On Linux, qemu/kvm works well enough for most purposes, on FreeBSD you have bhyve. OpenBSD's vmm is a thing, but I do not know if it can host other systems than OpenBSD, yet.

On Windows, there is Hyper-V. I have only very little experience with it, but in my short time, I did not encounter anything I would like to complain about. I am not sure, however, if it comes with the client editions of Windows. Microsoft Virtual PC still exists, too.

Xen is also a thing - run Dom0 as your desktop system, and run the VMs in the background.

None of this is perfect, but if you need them, there are alternatives.

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> Microsoft Virtual PC still exists

Not updated in almost 10 years, not supported on Windows 8 or 10.

I'm pretty sure the Virtual PC product went on to become Hyper-V.

Some of the Xen technology went into Hyper-V. Microsoft had a partnership with the Cambridge labs.

My understanding is that Hyper-V replaced Virtual PC and was not based on it.

shudders Okay, that explains the vague feeling I had that something was not right with this one.

There is no particular reason to expect that qemu has any greater security that vbox. All of these systems have a significant amount of very critical code; I particularly sceptical of the hardware emulation part.

AWS recently started moving from a custom Xen to a custom KVM, but it doesn't seem it was for security reasons. Xen certainly is heavily used by public cloud providers.

QEMU is huge, but you choose what parts to use. If you stick to the defaults, e.g. your VM has one or more virtio devices, a virtual USB3 controller and USB tablet, maybe an IDE/AHCI controller and an e1000 or rtl8139 NIC, it should be pretty okay.

Because of its use with KVM, QEMU has had its code scrutinized quite closely in the last few years. There are some device models that have a pretty bad track record, such as Cirrus VGA, but they are not the default anymore and there's no reason why you should use them.

> I am not sure, however, if it comes with the client editions of Windows. Microsoft Virtual PC still exists, too.

It's in Windows 10 client editions too. Look under "Turn Windows features on or off". Windows Subsystem for Linux is there too.

Not on the Home edition or whatever it's called.

Do you know if it can be installed on Home even if it's not part of the standard installation media?

No it can't be.

Virtualization capable hardware required though (I don't know about Hyper-V).

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