Run your years-old VirtualBox images? If I were to guess; maybe QEMU does that too.

The qemu-img(1) installed on my system claims that it supports every disk format supported by Virtualbox [0], so I guess the only thing left would be to be able to handle the "machine definition" file.

qemu definitely won't do that out of the box, so, yeah, VirtualBox is better than qemu there. But I bet there's a fancy-pants GUI out there that has an import wizard that will handle that for you.

[0] <https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/topics/storage.html#vdidet...>

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kazinator 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Regardless of how suitable qemu is for Vbox users, it's unmatched for batch uses, like as something part of a distro build chain to allow non-cross-compilable packages to be built for ARM on x86-64 and such. And ... to interactively step into cross-compiled sysroots.

Vbox has the desktop experience. The "guest integration" stuff and whatnot. If you've used it for years, familiarity.

	▲	simoncion an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> ...it's unmatched for batch uses... Quite possibly. I know that it's what Openstack uses for virtualization. > ...to interactively step into... Sure, running on an emulated CPU can be very nice. > ...like as something part of a distro build chain to allow non-cross-compilable packages to be built for ARM on x86-64... This sounds like it would be incredibly slow. As in "It's better to just buy some inexpensive ARM PCs" slow. I know that GCC and Clang can cross-compile just fine. It looks like Rust cross-compiles, and I think Go does as well. Do you know of major tools and/or languages that don't cross-compile?