QEMU - A Crucial Building Block in Digital Preservation Strategies

Abstract

Emulation as long-term preservation strategy depends on us- able, reliable and sustainable emulators to preserve old or obsolete orig- inal digital environments. The most common approach to achieve this is to preserve the hardware layer of the dierent computer architectures. The open source project QEMU is in many ways a digital preservation tool that the community of memory institutions depends on. The requirements for emulation in preservation dier from those that exist for most virtualization tasks. QEMU has to bridge a widening gap between past and current digital environments by keeping the emulated hardware constant and reliable over time. To ensure reliability special test suites should be run on updated versions of QEMU. A number of software and unit tests could be run totally automated using the QEMU VNC and monitor interfaces on prepared system images of all preserva- tion relevant original environments. QEMU as a cooperative endeavor should extend its user base into the digital preservation domain. It could bring (nancial) support and thus foster more sustainability.

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