Following are excerpted from Build appliances with QEMU and OpenBSD, BSD Magazine, 2011.04.
- Boot from an ISO image: qemu -cdrom image.iso
- Create new hard disk for a VM: qemu-img create disk.bin 2G
- Install OS into the virtual disk: qemu -hda disk.bin -cdrom image.iso
- Boot VM from virtual disk: qemu disk.bin
- Boot VM with two virtual disks: qemu -hda first.bin -hdb second.bin
- Start VM in bridge mode network: qemu -net nic -net tap disk.bin
- Simulate multiple network cards: qemu -net nic,model=lance -net nic,model=pcnet -net nic,model=rt18139 disk.bin
- QEMU can also be used with remote machines without X in -nographic mode. For this you have to have this in boot.conf(FreeBSD):
# cat /etc/boot.conf
set tty com0
And start QEMU with command:
qemu -nographic disk.bin