KVM-Opencore VS QEMU

Compare KVM-Opencore vs QEMU and see what are their differences.

KVM-Opencore

OpenCore disk image for running macOS VMs on Proxmox/QEMU (by thenickdude)

QEMU

Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are ignored. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website. (by qemu)
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KVM-Opencore QEMU
36 190
1,141 9,277
- 2.8%
2.8 10.0
about 1 month ago 3 days ago
Makefile C
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

KVM-Opencore

Posts with mentions or reviews of KVM-Opencore. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-24.
  • Ventrua on Proxmox with GPU passthrough, Couldn't alloc class "AppleKeyStoreTest"
    1 project | /r/Proxmox | 27 May 2023
    The EFI folder is the same as v20 here
  • MacOS Ventura VM Safari not loading properly / rendering issue.
    1 project | /r/hackintosh | 17 May 2023
  • Ventura Installation: vm_shared_region_start_address() failed
    2 projects | /r/macOSVMs | 24 Mar 2023
    Build v19 from u/thenickdude
  • Suggestions for VGA mode
    2 projects | /r/qemu_kvm | 5 Feb 2023
    #!/usr/bin/env bash # Special thanks to: # https://github.com/Leoyzen/KVM-Opencore # https://github.com/thenickdude/KVM-Opencore/ # https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/docs/usb2.txt # # qemu-img create -f qcow2 mac_hdd_ng.img 128G # # echo 1 > /sys/module/kvm/parameters/ignore_msrs (this is required) ############################################################################ # NOTE: Tweak the "MY_OPTIONS" line in case you are having booting problems! ############################################################################ MY_OPTIONS="+ssse3,+sse4.2,+popcnt,+avx,+aes,+xsave,+xsaveopt,check" # This script works for Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra. Tested with # macOS 10.15.6, macOS 10.14.6, and macOS 10.13.6. ALLOCATED_RAM="7096" # MiB CPU_SOCKETS="1" CPU_CORES="8" CPU_THREADS="8" REPO_PATH="." OVMF_DIR="." # shellcheck disable=SC2054 args=( -enable-kvm -m "$ALLOCATED_RAM" -cpu Penryn,kvm=on,vendor=GenuineIntel,+invtsc,vmware-cpuid-freq=on,"$MY_OPTIONS" -machine q35 -usb -device usb-kbd -device usb-tablet -smp "$CPU_THREADS",cores="$CPU_CORES",sockets="$CPU_SOCKETS" -device usb-ehci,id=ehci # -device usb-kbd,bus=ehci.0 # -device usb-mouse,bus=ehci.0 -device nec-usb-xhci,id=xhci -global nec-usb-xhci.msi=off # -device usb-host,vendorid=0x8086,productid=0x0808 # 2 USD USB Sound Card # -device usb-host,vendorid=0x1b3f,productid=0x2008 # Another 2 USD USB Sound Card # -device vfio-pci,host=3:00.0,bus=pcie.0 -device isa-applesmc,osk="ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc" -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file="$REPO_PATH/$OVMF_DIR/OVMF_CODE.fd" -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file="$REPO_PATH/$OVMF_DIR/OVMF_VARS-1024x768.fd" -smbios type=2 -device ich9-intel-hda -device hda-duplex -device ich9-ahci,id=sata -drive id=OpenCoreBoot,if=none,snapshot=on,format=qcow2,file="$REPO_PATH/OpenCore/OpenCore.qcow2" -device ide-hd,bus=sata.2,drive=OpenCoreBoot -device ide-hd,bus=sata.3,drive=InstallMedia -drive id=InstallMedia,if=none,file="$REPO_PATH/BaseSystem.img",format=raw -drive id=MacHDD,if=none,file="$REPO_PATH/mac_hdd_ng.img",format=qcow2 -device ide-hd,bus=sata.4,drive=MacHDD # -netdev tap,id=net0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:c9:18:27 -netdev user,id=net0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:c9:18:27 # -netdev user,id=net0 -device vmxnet3,netdev=net0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:c9:18:27 # Note: Use this line for High Sierra -monitor stdio -device VGA,vgamem_mb=128 ) qemu-system-x86_64 "${args[@]}"
  • Proxmox Bootloop macos 13
    1 project | /r/macOSVMs | 29 Dec 2022
  • MacOS KVM GPU Passthrough Hangs
    4 projects | /r/VFIO | 7 Nov 2022
  • Catalina on the desktop proxmox?
    1 project | /r/Proxmox | 9 Oct 2022
    If that's my OpenCore ISO, I rechecked High Sierra recently with v18 and it boots fine.
  • Bare Metal vs Virtualization dual boot
    2 projects | /r/hackintosh | 27 Jul 2022
    The mid/hard way would be to have a powerful PC like I did recently, switch to Linux as the host, and use it as your main OS and then for specific stuff, turn on the Windows or OSX machines. The problem here is that you have to deal with Linux and its quirks... editing files with the terminal, sudo, setting up QEMU, editing the libvirt XML files (or create your own bash scripts for QEMU) and so on... It feels like a hassle sometimes, and getting OSX to work in a virtual environment is a hit or miss - there's a few projects out there that can help) but then getting them to work is like running a command and having it contained in its own "window" and you can also share files between the host and the VM almost seamlessly.
  • Windows 10 on MacOS Host?
    1 project | /r/VFIO | 21 Jul 2022
  • anyone able to boot big sur on coreboot/tianocore? i get reboots maybe because of bad dsdt in coreboot
    2 projects | /r/hackintosh | 20 Jul 2022
    What are you using to create VM? You don't need to configure these two: macOS Simple KVM OpenCore KVM

QEMU

Posts with mentions or reviews of QEMU. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-03.
  • QEMU Version 9.0.0 Released
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Apr 2024
    My most-wanted QEMU feature: https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commit/a2260983c6553

    Using `gic-version=3` on macOS you can now use more than 8 cores on ARM chips.

  • Autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2024
    A better solution is just to write a plain ass shell script that tests if various C snippets compile.

    https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/configure

    https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/build/detect-pwe...

    Not an unholy mix of m4, shell, and C, all in the same file.

    ---

    These are the same style as a the configure scripts that Fabrice Bellard wrote for tcc and QEMU.

    They are plain ass shell scripts, because he actually understands the code he writes.

    https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/configure

    https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc/blob/mob/configure

    OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”.

    You don’t have to copy and paste thousands of lines of GNU stuff that you don’t understand.

    (copy of lobste.rs comment)

  • WASM Instructions
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    Related:

    A fast Pascal (Delphi) WebAssembly interpreter:

    https://github.com/marat1961/wasm

    WASM-4:

    https://github.com/aduros/wasm4

    Curated list of awesome things regarding WebAssembly (wasm) ecosystem:

    https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm

    Also, it would be nice if there was a WASM (soft) CPU for QEMU, which (if it existed!) would go here:

    https://github.com/qemu/qemu/tree/master/target

  • Revng translates (i386, x86-64, MIPS, ARM, AArch64, s390x) binaries to LLVM IR
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jan 2024
    > architectural registers are always updated

    In tiny code, the guest registers (global TCG variables) are stored in the host's registers until you either call an helper which can access the CPU state or you return (`git grep la_global_sync`). This is the reason why QEMU is not so terribly slow.

    But after a check, this also happens when you access the guest memory address space! https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/include/tcg/tcg-opc... (TCG_OPF_SIDE_EFFECTS is what matters)

    But still, in the end, it's the same problem. What QEMU does, can be done in LLVM too. You could probably be more efficient in LLVM by using the exception handling mechanism (invoke and friends) to only serialize back to memory when there's an actual exception, at the cost of higher register pressure. More or less what we do here: https://rev.ng/downloads/bar-2019-paper.pdf

  • State of x86-64 emulation of non-MacOS binaries
    1 project | /r/MacOS | 7 Dec 2023
    Um, in case you don't know, UTM (based on QEMU) is out for quite a while.
  • Multipass: Ubuntu Virtual Machines Made Easy
    3 projects | dev.to | 15 Nov 2023
    Some of these tools include Oracle VM VirtualBox (that I've used since before the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle), VMWare Workstation Player, and QEMU, but last year, I found out about Multipass.
  • Libsodium: A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2023
    For C/C++ projects that use meson as the build system, there is an excellent way to manage dependencies:

    https://mesonbuild.com/Wrapdb-projects.html

    https://mesonbuild.com/Wrap-dependency-system-manual.html

    meson will download and build the libraries automatically and give you a variable which you pass as a regular dependency into the built target:

    https://github.com/qemu/qemu/tree/005ad32358f12fe9313a4a0191...

    https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/tree/main/subprojects

    https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/37457412b3212463c5...

    Or, if you're using proper operating systems, they're managed by the usual package manager, just like everything else.

  • Top 6 Virtual Machine Software in 2023
    1 project | dev.to | 10 Aug 2023
    For all the users of the Linux platform, QEMU is the VM that you should go for. This software comes without any price tag and works as an emulator of various machines with utmost ease and completion; the software uses dynamic translations to emulate hardware peripherals and enhances its overall performance. If you are using QEMU as a virtualizer, then it will function exactly like the host system (provided you have the right set of hardware).
  • Show HN: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Aug 2023
  • UTM for Developers
    2 projects | dev.to | 17 Jul 2023
    In this tutorial, we set up macOS and Windows virtual machines on UTM, a macOS application that provides a GUI wrapper for QEMU, a powerful open-source emulator and virtualizer. UTM allows you to easily manage and run virtual machines without memorizing complex commands. It also has special handling for macOS, making it simpler to install compared to other virtual machine software.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing KVM-Opencore and QEMU you can also consider the following projects:

macOS-Simple-KVM - Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM.

UTM - Virtual machines for iOS and macOS

AMD_Vanilla - Native AMD macOS via OpenCore

TermuxArch - Experience the pleasure of the Linux command prompt in Android, Chromebook, Fire OS and Windows on smartphone, smartTV, tablet and wearable https://termuxarch.github.io/TermuxArch/

OSX-KVM - Personal fork for testing

Unicorn Engine - Unicorn CPU emulator framework (ARM, AArch64, M68K, Mips, Sparc, PowerPC, RiscV, S390x, TriCore, X86)

vendor-reset - Linux kernel vendor specific hardware reset module for sequences that are too complex/complicated to land in pci_quirks.c

Vagrant - Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.

OSX_GVT-D - Guide to pass iGPU to MacOS KVM guest.

xemu - Original Xbox Emulator for Windows, macOS, and Linux (Active Development)

OpenCorePkg - OpenCore bootloader

em-dosbox - An Emscripten port of DOSBox