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A: VirtualBox makes use of QEMU in two ways: first of all, some of our virtual hardware devices have their origin in the QEMU project. We have found them to be very useful and took them as a starting point.
No. Without hardware acceleration, the performance should be fairly equal. VirtualBox may have advanced x86 optimizations that make it run slightly faster in software, which would be appropriate since virtualbox only supports x86 in the first place, while qemu has a much broader playing field (non-x86 architectures).
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator. It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems.
KVM, a type 1 hypervisor, is smaller and faster than VirtualBox, but VirtualBox is more scalable. KVM is better integrated with Linux, and while it will work with other guests, it works best with Linux. In short, if you want to install a binary Linux distribution as a guest, it's better to use KVM.
Basically both have features which the other does not have, so this might ease the decision. QEMU/KVM is better integrated in Linux, has a smaller footprint and should therefore be faster.
VirtualBox is a virtualization software limited to x86 and amd64 architecture. Xen uses QEMU for the hardware assisted virtualization, but can also paravirtualize guests without hardware virtualisation. QEMU supports a wide range of hardware and can make use of the KVM when running a target architecture which is the same as the host architecture.
Xen is a Type-1 hypervisor where VirtualBox and QEMU are considered as Type-2 hypervisors (also there might be a debate considering kvm being a kernel module).
A similar question has been asked before in this community.
QEMU with KVM is much, much faster than VirtualBox, you can test it yourself:
VirtualBox:
QEMU
Disk and CPU tests provided similar results, more or less.
A difference is the supported list of instructions. Virtualbox and VMware don't support the f16c-instructions supported by architectures beginning with Ivy Bridge, which limits compilations even with newer CPUs to those for Sandy Bridge and leads to other incompatibilities.
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