UPDATE: The qemu-kvm.git fork has been merged back into qemu.git as of QEMU 1.3.0. Always use qemu.git for the latest code. See my full post here.
"What is the difference between QEMU and KVM?" comes up regularly because these two pieces of software share a close relationship. I am going to explain how to choose between the two and the nature of their relationship.Should I install the qemu or qemu-kvm package?
If you want to run x86 virtual machines on x86 physical machines, install qemu-kvm. It has the fastest and most thoroughly tested support for the common x86 virtualization use case.
If you want to run anything else, install qemu. That includes running non-x86 machines and user level emulation instead of full-system emulation.
If you are still not sure which is right for you, take a look at the QEMU and KVM websites.
How do I check that qemu-kvm is using hardware support?
If qemu-kvm is unable to use hardware virtualization extensions it will fall back to emulation which is much slower. If you are worried this might be the case, run the following check:
grep 'svm\|vmx' /proc/cpuinfo
If you get output then the CPU supports virtualization extensions and KVM should work. Otherwise check that virtualization is enabled in your BIOS.
See the processor support KVM wiki page for more information.
It is also a good idea to use the -enable-kvm command-line option to ensure that KVM is used. The libvirt, virt-manager, virsh stack will do this by default.
What is the difference between qemu.git and qemu-kvm.git?
The QEMU codebase is known as qemu.git. That's the git repository that holds the QEMU source code history. The KVM codebase is known as qemu-kvm.git, the git repository that holds the KVM source code history.
The relationship between qemu.git and qemu-kvm.git is as follows. qemu-kvm.git is a fork of qemu.git and periodically merges updates from qemu.git back into qemu-kvm.git. A lot of code changes are merged into qemu.git and become available in qemu-kvm.git after the next periodic merge. KVM-specific enhancements may be merged into qemu-kvm.git and may be sent back upstream to qemu.git.
Efforts are underway to completely merge qemu-kvm.git into qemu.git. This will make qemu-kvm.git obsolete and result in a single codebase. In the future there may only be a qemu package.
