[Qemu-devel] How does the shell/os know to use qemu to launch a program?

[Qemu-devel] How does the shell/os know to use qemu to launch a program?

[Corbin Champion]

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I have used qemu for some time.  I am curious how the shell or os detects
that qemu is needed to run a program?

The reason for this is as follows:
I am on a system, but am not root.  The system does not have qemu installed
by root, and it will not be, but I have downloaded it myself.  I can run
programs manually via *qemu-arm program_name* as usual.  But, I would like
the shell or os to auto detect that qemu is needed.

How is this normally done?  How do I pull off the same as non-root (even if
it is complicated)?

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Corbin

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Re: [Qemu-devel] How does the shell/os know to use qemu to launch a program?

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 02:41:24PM -0700, Corbin Champion wrote:
> I have used qemu for some time.  I am curious how the shell or os detects
> that qemu is needed to run a program?
> 
> The reason for this is as follows:
> I am on a system, but am not root.  The system does not have qemu installed
> by root, and it will not be, but I have downloaded it myself.  I can run
> programs manually via *qemu-arm program_name* as usual.  But, I would like
> the shell or os to auto detect that qemu is needed.
> 
> How is this normally done?  How do I pull off the same as non-root (even if
> it is complicated)?

As root you can setup binfmt-misc, which teaches the kernel to invoke
foreign executables through QEMU:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc

As non-root it may be necessary to use shell aliases or wrapper scripts.
This requires setup for every program you wish to launch via QEMU.

Stefan