General-purpose machine emulator widely used for cross-architecture testing and full-system Linux emulation. Has nominal support for many embedded targets (Cortex-M, RISC-V), but peripheral fidelity is minimal — most MCUs are modeled at the CPU level only with little to no peripheral, interrupt-timing, or clock-tree simulation.
Phase out QEMU as an embedded-MCU simulator. Switch to Renode (#29) for MCU-class simulation with peripheral and interconnect modeling, or to vendor-specific simulators (Imperas, Synopsys VP) when cycle accuracy matters. Keep QEMU only for full-system Linux emulation, which is what it was actually designed for.
QEMU is excellent at its original purpose — full-system Linux emulation across ISAs. It's just the wrong tool for embedded MCU work, and Renode plus vendor simulators have made the alternative viable.