Depending on your operating system you (almost certainly) need to install some prerequisites first. The following sections will give you a brief overview of how to install the necessary software to build QEMU from source code under recent versions of Arch Linux, Debian and Ubuntu Linux as well as under macOS.
# This also install all optional QEMU dependencies
sudo pacman -S seabios gnutls libpng libaio numactl libnfs lzo snappy curl \
vde2 libcap-ng spice libcacard usbredir libslirp libssh zstd liburing \
virglrenderer sdl2 vte3 libpulse libjack.so brltty spice-protocol python \
ceph libiscsi glusterfs python-sphinx xfsprogssudo apt install -y build-essential git libglib2.0-dev ninja-build meson libpixman-1-dev python3-venv python3-pip# Install Homebrew Package Manager (https://brew.sh/)
# -> Run the following command in macOS Terminal
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
# Install prerequisites
brew install glib gnutls jpeg libpng libtool libusb lzo make nettle ninja pixman pkg-config snappy
# Make newly installed gmake (temporarily) take higher precedence
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/make/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"