QEMU for Debian Developers

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator, that relies on dynamic binary translation to achieve a reasonable speed. It can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). It supports emulating several hardware platforms, among others AMD64, ARM, CRIS, i386, PowerPC, MIPS, and SH4, SPARC.

QEMU can be an helpful tool for Debian Developers, as it supports a good subset of official Debian architectures. Experience has shown it is able to reproduce most of the problems detected on real hardware, and thus can be used to debug architecture specific problems. Compared to the Debian Developer accessible machines, it allows the user to have full access to the "machine", either to install new packages or to debug low level packages such as the kernel. Compared to real hardware, it is usually slower (though for some architectures, it may be faster than easily available cheap hardware), but as it is only a piece of software it can be available anywhere. Imagine having access to half a dozen of architectures while working on a laptop in a plane!