QEMU can be built on older distros even though it requires fairly new Meson, because Meson is easy to embed in the QEMU tarbell's (and in the repo as a submodul

QEMU can be built on older distros even though it requires fairly new Meson, because Meson is easy to embed in the QEMU tarbell's (and in the repo as a submodule). The port only required two custom-developed features, though. Contributing those was a minor piece of the whole effort.