... might pop up soon. As many of you may know,
QEMU is a free (
libre) machine emulator for Windows and UNIX host operating systems.
Q is an excellent Mac OS X port of QEMU, which rivals VirtualPC and costs absolutely nothing. On Windows, GNU/Linux, and FreeBSD, QEMU's guest OS performance can be accelerated to almost native speed with the KQEMU accelerator module, which transforms QEMU into a virtualizer. Unfortunately, KQEMU has not been ported to Mac OS X.
Earlier this month, the formerly proprietary KQEMU was released under the GNU GPL, making QEMU+KQEMU an entirely free VM option. With KQEMU now free and open source, I bet there will be a working port of KQEMU to Mac OS X by the end of 2007. Even if there isn't, a new free VM solution called
VirtualBox was released in January by InnoTek, and they have stated that they intend to port VirtualBox to Mac OS X. This means that free (both libre and gratis) virtualization on Mac OS X might be a reality within the year!
February 22nd, 2007, 12:24 PM
