What is this qemu-system-aarch64 process and why is it using almost 3 GB of RAM on my M1 Mac

Question

I am on my M1 Mac mini(Big Sur 11.3.1) and got a message that I am running out of RAM and should close some apps. I saw this process called qemu-system-aarch64 that takes up to 3GB of RAM. I don't know what it does and cannot stop it either. What is it and why does it eat up so much RAM?

Answer 1

This process belongs to an application you've installed yourself. To find out more, select the process in Activity Monitor and press Cmd-I to open the Process Information window. You should see the name of the process which started it at the top, and the path to the binary itself near the top of the 3rd tab (open files and ports).