QEMU Windows Portable Version (with HAXM accelerator and QEMU GUI)

[Patrick Schleizer]

Please consider providing a QEMU Windows portable [1] [2] [3] version on official qemu.org.

Reasons:

* This would improve usability, the out of the box user experience of laymen (non-technical) users.
* Linux distributions could add the QEMU Windows portable to their installer / live ISO images (and the DVD's autorun.inf). Users who are still running on the Windows platform could be having an easy path to try out a Linux distribution by running int inside QEMU. I've seen that in many some years ago. Was running Windows. Just open the DVD drive in Windows explorer, double click and QEMU (shipped with the ISO) booted the ISO.

Ideally EMU Windows portable version would be bundled with:

* the [QEMU HAXM accelerator] by default. Related ticket: [5]
* a QEMU GUI by default. Related ticket: [6]

[1] When I say "Windows Portable" I mean "USB portable". [4]

[2] A compress archive (zip or so) which after extraction can be executed without further installation / setup required. As far I know [https://portableapps.com portableapps.com] is the most popular project of that kind.

[3] QEMU might already be portable or mostly portable. See:

* https://portableapps.com/search/node/QEMU
* https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aportableapps.com%20QEMU%20portable
* https://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=640
* https://willhaley.com/blog/simple-portable-linux-qemu-vm-usb/

But not sure above projects are still maintained. Would be certainly better if official qemu.org would be providing a QEMU Windows portable version.

[4] Or more generally "can be run on any external storage medium on any Windows [10] computer.

[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1864955

[6] https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1865248

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

QEMU, like most open source projects, relies on contributors who have motivation, skills and available time to work on implementing particular features. They naturally tend to focus on features that result in the greatest benefit to their own use cases. I'm sorry, but as far as I know there is currently nobody working on such a topic, and opening a ticket like this won't make it happen without some new contributor to step up to do the job. Thus I'm closing this ticket now. Feel free to re-open if you know someone who could contribute this feature.