Documentation
The QEMU website has a Documentation page with pointers to the current actively maintained documentation including rendered versions of the user manual and selection of the developer documentation. More free form documentation can be found here on the wiki.
How do I...
For users
- QEMU Main Documentation (HTML generated from QEMU sources, updated frequently)
- Set up Networking
- Setting up VirtFS (9P Sharing over Virtio) between the guest and host
- Create a Snapshot
- Ubuntu Development Ports - details on qemu-<arch> usage, chroot set up, system emulation and cross compilation
- Compiling with qemu-user chroot - details on tuning binfmt_misc with magic patterns for making alien binaries run from the shell with silent invocation of QEMU
- Use vhost-user with OVS/DPDK as backend
- Set up storage for live migration
- Replacements for removed features
Building QEMU from source:
- on Linux hosts
- on macOS hosts
- on BSD hosts (includes info on setting up a BSD VM on a Linux host)
- for Windows (natively or cross-built on Linux)
For users that target for a specific platform:
- Running ARM guests on QEMU
- Running POWER / sPAPR / pseries guests on QEMU
- Running PowerPC Macintosh / Linux guests on QEMU
- Running m68k Macintosh / Linux guests on QEMU
- Running SPARC guests on QEMU
- Running ALPHA guests on QEMU
- Running OpenRISC guests on QEMU
- Running RISC-V guests on QEMU
- Debian on an emulated MIPS(EL) machine based upon some Debian Linux host
- Windows XP on QEMU-x86 based upon some Linux host (brief but good hints on the guest set up)
- Windows 2000 on QEMU-x86
- FreeDos on QEMU-x86 based upon some Linux host (concentrates on host details)
For developers
- Get started as a QEMU developer
- Debug QEMU
- There is a "developer's guide" in docs/devel, though it has significant gaps. You can see a rendered version of it on readthedocs
- The wiki has a list of all wiki pages marked as developer documentation
Note that much of QEMU's internals are documented only in comments in the source code, or not at all.
Technical Documentation
- The docs/ directory in the QEMU tree contains more user and developer documentation.
- Hardware Manuals
- Instruction Set Manuals (Assembly Language)
- PC Platform
External Sites
Other efforts
- QEMU documentation on wikibooks.org
- QEMU-Buch / QEMU-Book - A quite versatile book on QEMU, provided in German and English (partly as a google translation), but likely rather outdated nowadays.
Blogs
All Documentation Pages on Wiki
- Documentation/9p
- Documentation/9p root fs
- Documentation/9psetup
- Documentation/Architecture
- Documentation/CreateSnapshot
- Documentation/Debugging
- Documentation/Debugging with Valgrind
- Documentation/GettingStartedDevelopers
- Documentation/GitSubmodules
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/MacOS10.4
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/MacOS10.8
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/MacOS9
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/Ubuntu(ppc)
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/Windows7
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/Windows95
- Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/WindowsNT4.0(x86)
- Documentation/HardwareManuals
- Documentation/ISAManuals
- Documentation/KQemu
- Documentation/Migration with shared storage
- Documentation/Networking
- Documentation/Networking/NAT
- Documentation/Platforms
- Documentation/Platforms/ARM
- Documentation/Platforms/Alpha
- Documentation/Platforms/CRIS
- Documentation/Platforms/HPPA
- Documentation/Platforms/LatticeMico32
- Documentation/Platforms/MIPS
- Documentation/Platforms/MicroBlaze
- Documentation/Platforms/Moxie
- Documentation/Platforms/Nios2
- Documentation/Platforms/OpenRISC
- Documentation/Platforms/PC
- Documentation/Platforms/POWER
- Documentation/Platforms/PowerNV
- Documentation/Platforms/PowerPC
- Documentation/Platforms/RISCV
- Documentation/Platforms/S390X
- Documentation/Platforms/SH4
- Documentation/Platforms/SPARC
- Documentation/Platforms/TileGX
- Documentation/Platforms/TriCore
- Documentation/Platforms/Unicore32
- Documentation/Platforms/Xtensa
- Documentation/Platforms/m68k
- Documentation/QMP
- Documentation/QOMConventions
- Documentation/TCG
- Documentation/TCG/backend-ops
- Documentation/TCG/frontend-ops
- Documentation/vhost-user-ovs-dpdk