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The QEMU 7.0 open-source machine emulator and virtualizer has been released today as a major update to this powerful virtualization backend used by popular software like GNOME Boxes for machine virtualization.
Almost a year in the works, QEMU 7.0 is here with major new features like support for logging guest events via the ACPI ERST interface, improved security label support for the virtiofs shared file system for virtual machines, improved flexibility for fleecing backups, including support for non-qcow2 images, as well as support for Intel AMX on the x86 platform.
For ARM platforms, this release adds ‘virt’ board support for virtio-mem-pci with the ability to specify guest CPU topology and enable PAuth when using KVM/hvf, ‘xlnx-versal-virt’ board support for PMC SLCR and emulation of the OSPI flash memory controller, as well as support for ‘xlnx-zynqmp’ to model the CRF and APU control.
For the RISC-V platform, QEMU 7.0 introduces KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) support, ‘spike’ machine support for OpenSBI binary loading, support for the ratified 1.0 Vector extension, support for the Zve64f, Zve32f, Zfhmin, Zfh, zfinx, zdinx, and zhinx{min} extensions, as well as ‘virt’ machine support for 32 cores and AIA support.
For the OpenRISC platform, it adds ‘sim’ board support for up to 4 cores to allow loading of external initrd images and to automatically generate a device tree for the boot kernel. Also, for the HPPA platform, the new QEMU release adds support for up to 16 vCPUs, improves the graphics driver for HP-UX VDE/CDE environments, allows users to set SCSI boot order, and implements various other new features.
Last but not least, PowerPC support was enhanced with ‘pseries’ emulation support for running guests as a nested KVM hypervisor, support for the spapr-nvdimm device, ‘powernv’ emulation improvements for XIVE and PHB 3/4, as well as support for XIVE2 and PHB5.
Also, the s390x (IBM System z) platform received support for the “Miscellaneous-Instruction-Extensions Facility 3” z15 extension.
QEMU 7.0 contains more than 2500 commits from 225 authors, so check out the full changelog for more details. Meanwhile, you can download the QEMU 7.0 sources right now from the official website if you fancy compiling it, or wait for the new release to land in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution to update.
Last updated 2 years ago
