We’re using the QCOW2 format to create a 20GB image. Once the installation is done, we can create the disk image that we’re going to install Ubuntu on. It will pull in a few dependencies (the package depends on 14 other packages) and the installation can take a few minutes. The version we’re using in this tutorial is 5.1.0: $ brew install qemuĬopyright (c) 2003-2020 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers This changed 2 years ago when the project added support for the macOS native hypervisor with amework (HVF) as an accelerator.īefore we begin with the setup I assume that the Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop ISO has been downloaded in the current working directory. Using QEMU on macOS used to be very slow as no accelerator was available. The most popular accelerator is KVM which is built into the Linux kernel and allows Linux hosts to run VMs with native performance. QEMU is a hardware emulator which can make use of different accelerators when running VMs. Note for users on macOS 11.0: follow this post first to get qemu to run. In this blog post we’re going to create a Ubuntu 20.04 VM using QEMU on MacOS. Using QEMU to create a Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop VM on macOS Home Using QEMU to create a Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop VM on macOS September 20, 2020