In this post, I’m going to introduce a useful technique to people who are using, or are interested in using, QEMU on Windows. Basically, you can make the most of your hardware to accelerate QEMU virtual machines on Windows: starting with its 2.9.0 release, QEMU is able to take advantage of Intel HAXM to run x86 and x86_64 VMs with hardware acceleration.

Sometimes, there is a VM disk image whose contents you want to manipulate without booting the VM. One way of doing this is to use libguestfs, which can boot a minimal Linux VM to provide the host with secure access to the disk’s contents. For example, guestmount allows you to mount a guest filesystem on the host, without requiring root rights.