Qemu?

Quick Emulator

(At least it was when it was written. Rosetta blows it out of the water.)

What is Rosetta?

Apple’s x86->ARM transpiler

(It accomplishes this by “cheating” and turning on a feature only found in Apple Silicon that make concurrent memory access rules more similar to x86, but still)

How does that apply to qemu?

Qemu is an emulator designed to allow you to run software for one architecture on another, much like Rosetta does. Qemu has gained the ability to run native virtual machines using hardware virtualization, which it does astonishingly well, but its original purpose is emulation. In terms of quickness, though, more modern offerings run circles around it

Do you have benchmarks to confirm that hardware accelerated virtualization on qemu is slow? It is what powers a lot of things including hypervisors like Proxmox. It also supports hyper-v acceleration. As far as Apple is concerned no one is really running a Mac so that isn’t a useful comparison.

I didn’t say hardware accelerated virtualization on qemu was slow. In fact, it’s one of the best performing hypervisors out there. When used as an emulator, however, its performance leaves something to be desired.