Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

QEMU is absolutely incredible. I think its most undersold feature is the fact that it runs on Windows hosts[0] thanks to MinGW. This in itself isn't unique, but what is unique is that by default it runs entirely without admin privileges. I've been playing with shipping server apps as QEMU VMs and it works surprisingly well. QEMU itself is small enough (~20MB) to ship the entire thing with the app, including DLLs.

With -accel whpx you can even get pretty solid CPU acceleration. WHPX[1] is sort of like KVM for Windows, only takes a couple clicks and a reboot to enable, and ships on both Windows Home and Pro. Other than the heroes who did the actual work, we probably have Android to thank[2] for this situation.

If you're willing to get your hands a little dirty, QEMU is a fairly viable alternative to WSL or even Docker on Windows.

[0]: https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/android/get-started...

[2]: https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator-accelerati...

QEMU and FFmpeg are sort of in this category of tooling that are incredibly powerful. The amount of things you can do with it, the technical achievement, is incredible.

And the only thing holding them back is that you need 3 pages of command-line arguments to invoke them properly :-)

(EDIT: I was just reminded that both were started by the same author: Fabrice Ballad)

I'm not sure if you chose those two software randomly, so just in case you did: they both have the same creator, Fabrice Bellard

Yes, we were very excited to get WHP (Windows Hypervisor Platform) support integrated. Before that, you could only use it with the HAXM hypervisor on Windows, which conflicts with the Windows hypervisor (used by Hyper-V, WSL2, and the Windows Subsystem for Android).

It's huge honestly. Do you think there's any chance of Microsoft enabling WHP by default? I think using microVMs for sandboxing apps could be amazing for securing user applications, but currently you still have to instruct users how to turn it on and reboot.

Also, how active is the WHP work in QEMU? Is it mostly done by the QEMU folks or inside MS? Is anyone other than Android actively banging on it?

Sorry for the deluge of questions but I think there's a ton of untapped potential in this tech.

I didn't see anyone mentioning about GPU acceleration for 3D graphics so just in case for those who are not aware, Virtio-GPU, a virtual GPU implemented in Qemu for Linux and classic Windows OS guest machines, which works under Windows host. Just like VMWare.

You can watch some demo videos from the YouTube channel "KJ Liew",

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl8InhZs1ixZBcLrMDSWd0A/vid...

I think KJ Liew is also the person that submitted patches to Qemu for M1 Mac to have 3D acceleration in Linux/Classic Window OS guests

That channel looks awesome. Looks like they have a bunch of videos where they play classic PC games on old Windows versions running inside QEMU.

https://github.com/intel/haxm looks cool, thanks! Windows Home support saves a few bucks.

I wonder if there's actually any reason to use HAXM these days, since WHP ships with windows and works for both Intel and AMD CPUs?

Enabling Hyper-V on Windows currently causes problems with VirtualBox, so that’s one reason. They’re (vbox) working on fixing it, but it hasn’t landed yet.

Enabling Windows Hypervisor Platform doesn't require enabling Hyper-V. Hyper-V doesn't even exist on Windows Home, but WHP does. That said, I have no idea whether WHP interferes with VirtualBox.

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