[DONE] Can QEMU work on a non hardware virtualized laptop?

[bots4ever]

Hi,

I would like to know if my laptop can run virt-manager using QEMU. From what I understood, QEMU can emulate an operating system under certain "vritualized" machine (e.g. Pentium 2 based machine). I believe my laptop does not have virtualization support yet. My host machine is Mageia 4 x86 with 2GB of RAM and I would like to run a lightweight distro called "Slitaz". Here are my hardware specification:

Pentium M (Dothan) 1.5 GHZ
2GiB RAM DDR2 PC533
40GB HDD IDE

I don't want to test because I had a devastating experience way back when my laptop was still running WindowsXP. I tried Virtualbox and attempted to run a linux based OS (can't remember which one though) and destroyed my previous HDD. So if anyone with a similar old hardware that have successfully tried this, kindly let me know.

[bots4ever]

I guess no one has used such old hardware or maybe my question is kind of "dumb" for an answer. Let me try to help you understand the "dumb" aspect if that is the case.

Super Nintendo Entertainment system or simply "SNES" is a console gaming machine way back in the 90s. Nowadays, we have an "emulator" that can make SNES run on a PC hardware by emulating the "hardware" part of SNES and given that you have a ROM (the file that makes you play the games) you should be able to enjoy those games without having the real thing. An example of this emulator is Snes9x (which is present in Mageia 4) and Zsnes (My favorite SNES emulator). Both applications does not need virtualization support from a processors perspective and this is how I understand QEMU. As I understand KVM, on the other hand, requires Hardware virtualization to be able to run its purpose.

Will keep this open for a few more days and hopefully someone can shed a light to my question.

[doktor5000]

You should probably read up on QEMU vs. KVM, maybe it becomes clearer then:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/FAQ#What_ ... nd_QEMU.3F

You can e.g. easily run qemu to run some .iso image via e.g.

Code: Select all

qemu -m 512M -cdrom <isoname>.iso

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_us ... ISO_Images

[bots4ever]

Hi doktor5000,

Thank you for the link you provided.

After reading and digesting every QEMU information out there. I went ahead and installed qemu + virt-manager + libvirt-utils on my 32bit machine. I'm trying Slitaz 4.0 on that machine while i'm writing this message on another laptop. It seems to be running fine but I have to comment that IT IS slow.

QEMU does not explicitly say that it does not need hardware virtualization to run that is why I am having reservations attempting to run this software on an old laptop. I was planning to use this machine to play with niche systems like freeDOS, puppy linux and systems requiring very low resources.

So to answer, can QEMU run on an old laptop without hardware virtualization? The answer is YES but expect a huge performance penalty.

I hope this information can be beneficial to others. Marking thread as [DONE].

[doktor5000]

Well, qemu is an emulator. KVM is an hypervisor requiring hardware acceleration.
Virtualbox would also be possible, but on a single-core system like yours it will probably not be much better then qemu.