The release of the new version of QEMU 6.1 in which more than 3000 changes were made by 221 developers, of which the controller improvements, as well as support for more boards of which Cortex-M3 stands out, improvements for PowerPC, support for hardware encryption, among other changes.
For those who are unfamiliar with QEMU, they should know that it is software that allows you to run a compiled program for a hardware platform on a system with a completely different architectureFor example, to run an ARM application on an x86 compatible PC.
In virtualization mode in QEMU, performance of code execution in sandbox environment is close to hardware system due to direct execution of instructions on CPU and use of Xen hypervisor or KVM module.
Main novelties of QEMU 6.1
In this new version that is presented of QEMU 6.1, we can find that by default, plugin support for TCG code generator (Tiny Code Generator) classic is enabled and that new execlog (execution log) and cache shaping (simulation of L1 cache behavior on CPU) were added.
Another novelty that stands out in this new version is that added support for boards based on Aspeed chips (rainier-bmc, quanta-q7l1), npcm7xx (quanta-gbs-bmc) and Cortex-M3 (stm32vldiscovery) in the ARM emulator.
While on the part of the support for newer Intel CPU models on x86 emulator Have been added Skylake-Client-v4, Skylake-Server-v5, Cascadelake-Server-v5, Cooperlake-v2, Icelake-Client-v3, Icelake-Server-v5, Denverton-v3, Snowridge - v3, Dhyana-v2 that implement the XSAVES instruction.
While in the GUI, el support password authentication when the protocol is used VNC is now only enabled when it is built with an external crypto backend (gnutls, libgcrypt, or nettle).
We can also find that I know added support for hardware encryption and the hashing engines provided on Aspeed chips, this also along with support for emulating SVE2 instructions (including bfloat16), operators for matrix multiplication, and commands for flushing associative translation buffers (TLBs).
The architecture emulator PowerPC “pseries” for emulated machiness has added support for detecting hot plug failures in new guest environments, it increased the CPU limit and implemented the emulation of some instructions specific to the POWER10 processors.
Furthermore, it is mentioned that as priority encryption driver, gnutls is used, which is ahead of other controllers in terms of performance, while the e-based controllern default libgcrypt offered above has been moved to an option and the nettle-based driver has been left as an alternative for use in the absence of GnuTLS and Libgcrypt.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version of QEMU 6.1:
- Support for PMBus and I2C multiplexers (pca9546, pca9548) was added to the I2C emulator.
- The RISC-V emulator supports the OpenTitan platform and the virtual GPU virtio-vga (based on virgl).
- The s390 emulator adds support for 16th generation CPUs and vector extensions.
- Added support for boards based on Genesi / bPlan Pegasos II chips (pegasos2).
- The Q35 (ICH9) chipset emulator supports hot plugging of PCI devices. Improved emulation of virtualization extensions provided on AMD processors.
- Experimental support for the ePMP specification
- Initial support for the experimental Bit Manip extension
- Added the bus-lock-ratelimit option to limit the intensity of the bus lock by the guest system.
- Added "blockdev-reopen" command to QMP (QEMU Machine Protocol) to change the configuration of an already created block device.
- Support was added for its use as an accelerator for the NVMM hypervisor developed by the NetBSD project.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it of the changes and novelties that are presented in this new version of QEMU 6.1, you can check the details and more in the following link.