by 
The open-source QEMU 8.0 machine emulator and virtualization software has been released as a major update that brings various new features and improvements to ARM, RISC-V, x86, s390x, and HPPA platforms.
Coming a year after QEMU 7.0, the QEMU 8.0 release is here to improve support for ARM and RISC-V architectures. For ARM, it adds emulation support for FEAT_EVT, FEAT_FGT, and AArch32 ARMv8-R, CPU emulation for Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52, support for a new Olimex STM32 H405 machine type, as well as gdbstub support for M-profile system registers.
For the RISC-V architecture, QEMU 8.0 brings updated machine support for OpenTitan, PolarFire, and OpenSBI, additional ISA and Extension support for smstateen, native debug icount trigger, cache-related PMU events in virtual mode, Zawrs/Svadu/T-Head/Zicond extensions, and ACPI support.
Moreover, RISC-V received multiple fixes covering PMP propagation for TLB, mret exceptions, uncompressed instructions, and other emulation/virtualization improvements.
For the HP Precision Architecture (HPPA) platform, the QEMU 8.0 release brings improvements to the fid (Floating-Point Identify) instruction support and 32-bit emulation.
On the other hand, the s390x (IBM Z) platform received support for asynchronous teardown of memory of secure KVM guests during reboot and improved handling of zPCI passthrough devices.
For x86, the latest QEMU release introduces a new SapphireRapids CPU model, support for Xen guests under KVM with Linux kernel 5.12 and later, as well as TCG support for the FSRM, FZRM, FSRS, and FSRC CPUID flags.
Among other noteworthy changes, QEMU 8.0 improves virtio-mem with support for using preallocation in conjunction with live migration, updated experimental migration support to v2 for the VFIO migration protocol, and improved efficiency over TCP and when using TLS for qemu-nbd.
QEMU 8.0 is available for download as a source tarball right now from the official website if you fancy compiling it yourself from sources. If that’s not the case, you should be able to install it from your distro’s stable repositories in the coming days or weeks.
Last updated 12 months ago
