13 engineers on Hacker News describe using QEMU first-hand: 2 endorse it, 1 regret it, 4 are mixed.
“QEMU's Raspberry Pi emulation accuracy was so abysmal back then to be borderline useless for osdev.”
regret · personal · boricj · 2025-06-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Works fine on linux, so long as your mesa and kernel aren't super ancient.”
endorse · personal · roblabla · 2023-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We had a couple of 3rd party things stuck on x86 so we emulated them on qemu within the vm. Slow, but ok”
mixed · production · aidos · 2022-06-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use KVM+qemu on Linux and attach PCI devices like GPU and storage to the VMs.”
endorse · personal · washadjeffmad · 2021-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using qemu on my mac as an alternative to docker... Works great... The networking was a bit of a pain in the ass to get going”
mixed · personal · jillesvangurp · 2021-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use the SiFive boards for the largest builds however, things like GCC and the kernel, because they're still much better than qemu.”
mixed · production · rwmj · 2018-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's great for what it is, but ... Even for our usecase, where QEMU was a very bad fit, the existence of QEMU let us get an MVP up in a week”
mixed · production · luu · 2017-01-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our own single-use QEMU VMs with Windows and Linux.”
neutral · production · 12 yr · defied · 2026-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using the latter (installed from homebrew) for the last few years passing --device virtio-vga.”
neutral · personal · C-x_C-f · 2024-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Qemu+libvirt, running several VMs for proxies, firewalls, VPN gateways and such.”
neutral · personal · baobun · 2023-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We do it for all the major Debian and Ubuntu distributions by using a qemu-chroot based build farm... with actual qemu binary emulation.”
neutral · production · api · 2023-03-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“once a process tree goes to x86 land, qemu cannot see it and it can't "natively" run an arm binary.”
neutral · production · valkmit · 2021-09-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“QEMU was missing the one target I cared about etc.”
neutral · personal · 4ad · 2014-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?