Installing Qemu on FreeBSD 11

Installation

QEMU is a hypervisor, that can emulate many number of architectures.Some of the architectures include:

• i386
• x86_64
• Alpha
• Arm
• MIPS
• MIPS64
• PPC
• PPC64
• Sparc
• Sparc64

In this article lets look at, how to install QEMU on FreeBSD 11. By default, QEMU on FreeBSD supports the following architectures.

• i386
• x86_64

Install Qemu using the following command.

pkg install qemu

Testing the installation

Create a virtual HDD file.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 image.img 10G

Download ISO file of a current version of linux distribution say Debian

fetch http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/9.0.0/amd64/iso-cd/debian-9.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso

Start off the installation of Debian from the ISO we just downloaded.

qemu-x86_64 -m 1024 -cdrom debian-9.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso -hda image.img -boot d  -net nic -net user -nographic -vnc :0

Connect to the Virtual machine we ran just now using the following entry on any VNC client.

<ip-address>:0

Once the Operating system is installed in the Virtual Machine, boot it using the following command.

qemu-x86_64 -m 1024 -cdrom debian-9.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso -hda image.img -boot c  -net nic -net user -nographic -vnc :0