Building QEMU with WHPX for Windows using MSYS and MinGW

Published 25^th August, 2022 in Technology on A Place For My Head. Tagged Bash, MinGW, MSYS, QEMU, Virtualization & Windows.

To build QEMU for Windows 10 or higher with hardware-accelerated virtualization via WHPX, install the Windows SDK (I recommend using Chocolatey) and follow these instructions within a MinGW shell:

Install the dependencies (taken from the Windows CI script):

Bashpacman -Sy --noconfirm --needed \
      diffutils git grep make sed \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-capstone \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-curl \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-cyrus-sasl \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-glib2 \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-gnutls \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-libnfs \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-libssh \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-libtasn1 \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-libusb \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-nettle \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-ninja \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-pixman \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-pkgconf \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-python \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_image \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-snappy \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-usbredir \
      mingw-w64-x86_64-zstd

Copy the desired version of the WHPX headers (adapted from RceNinja’s notes on GitHub—the Windows Kits directory was under the root for me):
```
Bashcp /c/Windows\ Kits/10/Include/10.0.19041.0/um/WinHv* /mingw64/x86_64-w64-mingw32/include/
```

Clone the QEMU source:

Bashgit clone https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu.git && cd qemu

Initialize the submodules with git submodule init && git submodule update -r. This might be done automatically by the configure script, but I did it in advance per the notes linked above.
Create the output directory and run export OUTPUT_PATH=path/to/output/directory.
Create a subdirectory for the build inside the source directory.

Run the configure script from within the build subdirectory:

Bash../configure --prefix=$OUTPUT_PATH \
             --target-list=x86_64-softmmu,i386-softmmu --enable-whpx \
             --enable-tools --enable-lzo --enable-bzip2 --enable-sdl \
             --enable-gtk --enable-vdi --enable-hax --disable-capstone

Run make -j (or -j N to use only N CPUs). It takes a while and the output can appear to pause mid-word.
Run make install.

The binaries produced can be run from the output directory (QEMU-bin/qemu-system-x86_64w.exe --accel whpx) in Windows without any further action. Note that there is no debug information attached. See RceNinja’s notes for what to copy if you need it.