Knowledge share: How to use qemu on Windows with acceleration in 2024

So using qemu with hyper-V acceleration is something that is not well documented. Historically, you would setup HAXM but that has been discontinued and deprecated.

To use qemu on WIndows with hardware acceleration you first start by enabling Hyper-V if it isn't enabled already. Next, run qemu with the following additional option:

--accel whpx,kernel-irqchip=off

In qtemu on Windows there is a GUI option to do this. I like qemu because it cleaner than pure Hyper-V and doesn't have the licensing issues that Virtualbox does. I also like that Linux guests have native support for virtual devices.

https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/qemu-manpage.html