I've recently deep-dived into QEMU performance especially in order to cut down boot/bootstrapping times for quickly running tests and I'd like to share some tricks:
- Templating: https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/v9.1.0/system/vm-templating.h... - virtio-fs: https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/ - Overlay storage images: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/QEMU#Overlay_storage_images