QEMU is an open source emulator and virualization sofware that can perform hardware virtualization. When used with KVM, virtual machines can run at near native speed. There are write up’s on how to run QEMU on macOS, windows and linux. I wanted to emulate the ARM64 architecture using QEMU and KVM. Since I didn’t have a computer hardware running linux, I wanted to try running a guest debian box and use QEMU/KVM to emulate the arm64 architecture. This makes for nested virtualization which is not ideal for speed and efficiency if you want to run a full desktop VM. In my case, all I wanted to do was debug the linux kernel on an arm64 arch.

Since QEMU can emulate a full computer system, I will be installing a debian OS. Yes, I am installing a debian guest on top of another debian host which is a guest VM on a Mac. From this point, assume my main host is a linux box. We have to install the latest version of version of QEMU on our host.

 sudo apt-get install qemu