QEMU 8.1 Promises New PipeWire Audio Backend, Improved RISC-V Support

The upcoming release also brings support for the TPM TIS I2C device model and improves ARM emulation.
QEMU 8.1

With QEMU 8.0 out the door, the QEMU development team works hard these days on implementing new features and improving existing ones for the next major release, QEMU 8.1, of this powerful open-source virtualization software for emulating various architectures.

QEMU 8.1 promises a new PipeWire audio backend (-audiodev pipewire) and better audio output and improved compatibility, support for the TPM TIS I2C device model, SCTLR_ELx.EPAN (FEAT_PAN3) emulation support for the ARM architecture, as well as Allwinner WDT watchdog emulation for Orange Pi PC and CubieBoard SBCs.

Also for ARM, the upcoming QEMU 8.1 release promises to make the second ethernet controller PHY usable on NXP MCIMX7D-SABRE and MCIMX6UL-EVK NXP devices.

There’s also good news for RISC-V emulation as QEMU 8.1 promises support for Ventana’s Veyron V1 CPU, as well as various other interesting changes like the implementation of the QMP query-cpu-definitions command, working Guest Physical Address Translation and mstatus.MPP-related support, and more.

Among other noteworthy changes, the upcoming QEMU release promises to make it possible for users to specify the input independently from the output with the -chardev file command (e.g. -chardev file,id=repro,path=/dev/null,input-path=input.txt) and bumps Python support to Python 3.8 and newer.

The final release of QEMU 8.1 is expected this summer, probably at the end of August 2023. Until then, if you want to give the new features and improvements a try, you can stay on the bleeding edge by building the current development version from the GitLab repository.

A first RC (Release Candidate) development build should be out on mid or late July 2023, after the Soft and Hard feature freeze stages in mid-July. If you do test the upcoming QEMU release, please report bugs on the project’s GitLab bug tracker.

Last updated 11 months ago

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