About this project

QEMU is a multi-platform Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) and emulator. We believe it is a key tool for open source projects who want to develop for the ARM ecosystem and experiment with the latest features. The QEMU team within Linaro are responsible for maintaining many parts of the project including ARM specific code, the core translation engine, developer features and parts of the testing automation and CI loop. Our primary goals are:

• Ensure an active and well maintained upstream project

• Upstream useful architectural features

• Support it as a software reference platforms for a number of projects

• Improve the developer experience of using QEMU

QEMU forms an important part of our work at Linaro where it a reference platform for many of our other software projects. For example several of the deployment scenarios of Project HVAC have been modelled in virtual QEMU setups before being run on real hardware.

We also work with other Linaro members to advise, review and support up-streaming of their code into the project.

We also help maintain the rust-vmm vhost-device backends which provide VirtIO backends for a number of VMMs and hypervisors.

Get Involved

The majority of the discussion is upstream with few Linaro specific calls and the occasional upstream KVM  call on a Tuesday

• Upstream IRC channel  is #qemu on OFTC,  Engineers nicks are pm215, rth, f4bug, manospitsid, pbo, gromero and stsquad

• Linaro IRC channel #linaro-virtualization on Libera.chat

Project Updates

There is a project planning update every 4 months after each QEMU release where we review what was delivered and what our roadmap looks like going forward.

The latest update was on the Jan 22, 2026

Open

Meetings