Central Queensland Linux User Group

QEmu is a brilliant way of emulating different architectures on your machine. If you're just wanting to emulate an x86 or x86_64 core, then vmware or virtualbox will provide a much better/convenient solution. However, if you're wanting to emulate an embedded arm or ppc core, this is where QEmu really shines.

Embedded arm development is typically pretty painful. There are usually three paths

1) Cross compiling - for very simple systems you can do this, but its full of bugs due to roughly built source packages and the complexity goes through the roof once you need to maintain more than a few packages.

2) Natively - usually great, but for arm cores, you have to do all your compiling at the really breakneck (so slow you want to break your neck on your desk!) speeds the cores offer.

3) Emulation with QEmu - convenient and faster. Qemu is often a bit of black magic though, however its getting easier as arm is gaining in popularity.

This book will detail how to do 3) emulate an arm core on your pc, either via chroots or via a complete graphical emulation. The process could be equally applied to something like a ppc core as well.