Setup build environment

QEMU uses a lot of dependencies on the host system a large number of which are optional. At a minimum we expect to have a system C library (usually glibc but others can work), the glib2 library (used heavily in the code base) and a few other core libraries for interfacing with code modules and system build descriptions.

We use the libvirt-ci project to handle the mapping of dependencies to a wide variety output formats including system install scripts. For example:

# THIS FILE WAS AUTO-GENERATED
#
#  $ lcitool buildenvscript debian-13 ./tests/lcitool/projects/qemu-minimal.yml
#
# https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt-ci

function install_buildenv() {
    export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
    apt-get update
    apt-get dist-upgrade -y
    apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y \
            bash \
            bc \
            bison \
            bzip2 \
            ca-certificates \
            ccache \
            findutils \
            flex \
            gcc \
            git \
            libc6-dev \
            libfdt-dev \
            libffi-dev \
            libglib2.0-dev \
            libpixman-1-dev \
            locales \
            make \
            meson \
            ninja-build \
            pkgconf \
            python3 \
            python3-venv \
            sed \
            tar
    sed -Ei 's,^# (en_US\.UTF-8 .*)$,\1,' /etc/locale.gen
    dpkg-reconfigure locales
    rm -f /usr/lib*/python3*/EXTERNALLY-MANAGED
    dpkg-query --showformat '${Package}_${Version}_${Architecture}\n' --show > /packages.txt
    mkdir -p /usr/libexec/ccache-wrappers
    ln -s /usr/bin/ccache /usr/libexec/ccache-wrappers/cc
    ln -s /usr/bin/ccache /usr/libexec/ccache-wrappers/gcc
}

export CCACHE_WRAPPERSDIR="/usr/libexec/ccache-wrappers"
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export MAKE="/usr/bin/make"
export NINJA="/usr/bin/ninja"
export PYTHON="/usr/bin/python3"

If you instead select the qemu.yml project file you will get all the dependencies that the project can use.

Using you system package manager

Note

Installing dependencies using your package manager build dependencies may miss out on deps that have been newly introduced in qemu.git. It also misses deps the distribution has decided to exclude.

Systems with Package Managers

Package Manager Commands
System	Command	Notes
Fedora	`sudo dnf update && sudo dnf builddep qemu`
Debian/Ubuntu	`sudo apt update && sudo apt build-dep qemu`	Must enable Sources List first
MacOS	`brew update && brew install $(brew deps --include-build qemu)`	Using Homebrew.

Windows

You first need to install MSYS2. MSYS2 offers different environments. x86_64 environments are based on GCC, while aarch64 is based on Clang.

We recommend to use MINGW64 for windows-x86_64 and CLANGARM64 for windows-aarch64 (only available on windows-aarch64 hosts).

Then, you can open a windows shell, and enter msys2 env using:

c:/msys64/msys2_shell.cmd -defterm -here -no-start -mingw64
# Replace -ucrt64 by -clangarm64 or -ucrt64 for other environments.

MSYS2 package manager does not offer a built-in way to install build dependencies. You can start with this list of packages using pacman:

Note: Dependencies need to be installed again if you use a different MSYS2 environment.

# update MSYS2 itself, you need to reopen your shell at the end.
pacman -Syu
pacman -S \
    base-devel binutils bison diffutils flex git grep make sed \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-toolchain \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-glib2 \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-gtk3 \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-libnfs \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-libssh \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-ninja \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-pixman \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-pkgconf \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-python \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-SDL2 \
    ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-zstd

If you want to install all dependencies, it’s possible to use recipe used to build QEMU in MSYS2 itself.

pacman -S wget base-devel git
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/refs/heads/master/mingw-w64-qemu/PKGBUILD
# Some packages may be missing for your environment, installation will still
# be done though.
makepkg --syncdeps --nobuild PKGBUILD || true

Build on windows-aarch64

When trying to cross compile meson for x86_64 using UCRT64 or MINGW64 env, configure will run into an error because the cpu detected is not correct.

Meson detects x86_64 processes emulated, so you need to manually set the cpu, and force a cross compilation (with empty prefix).

./configure --cpu=x86_64 --cross-prefix=