crosvm
7.3#4 in hypervisor softwareFree planFree planAndroidAPILinuxSelf-hosted
Visitcrosvm vs QEMU
What both publish
| Fact | crosvm | QEMU |
|---|---|---|
| Documentation depth | The project book covers building, running, system requirements, devices, testing, tracing, integration, architecture, hypervisors and contribution. | Official documentation includes user, system-emulation, device, security, interoperability and developer sections, with additional wiki material. |
| Hypervisors | The project lists KVM, Gunyah, GenieZone, and Halla for Linux or Android, plus WHPX and HAXM for Windows. | QEMU can work with KVM, Xen and Hypervisor.Framework to let guests run directly on the host CPU. |
| License | crosvm is released under the BSD-3-Clause license. | QEMU and its manual are released under GNU General Public License version 2, although some components have specific licenses. |
| Public API | The crosvm_control Rust library offers programmatic control instead of the command-line interface. | QEMU Machine Protocol is a JSON protocol for applications to control QEMU at machine level. |
| Security model | Virtual devices can run in separate processes jailed with Minijail. | QEMU defines guest isolation requirements and recommends least privilege for processes and resources. |
crosvm plans
- crosvmFree
QEMU plans
- QEMUFree
Pick crosvm if…
crosvm suits developers and systems teams running Linux or Android guests in sandboxed virtual machines. It is also used in ChromeOS, TerminalApp on Android, Cuttlefish, and Windows.
Pick QEMU if…
QEMU suits users who need whole-machine emulation, cross-architecture process execution, or disk-image utilities. It is available across several platforms, with specific Windows and macOS requirements.