QEMU version 3.0.0 released

15 Aug 2018

We’d like to announce the availability of the QEMU 3.0.0 release. This release contains 2300+ commits from 169 authors.

A note from the maintainer: Why 3.0? Well, we felt that our version numbers were getting a bit unwieldy, and since this year is QEMU’s 15th birthday it seemed like a good excuse to roll over the major digit. Going forward we plan to increment the major version once a year, for the first release of the year. Don’t read too much into it: it doesn’t imply a drastic compatibility break. Rumours of our triskaidekaphobia have been greatly exaggerated ;-)

You can grab the tarball from our download page. The full list of changes are available in the Wiki.

Highlights include:

  • Support for additional x86/AMD mitigations against Speculative Store Bypass (Spectre Variant 4, CVE-2018-3639)
  • Improved support for nested KVM guests running on Hyper-V
  • Block device support for active disk-mirroring, which avoids convergence issues which may arise when doing passive/background mirroring of busy devices
  • Improved support for AHCI emulation, SCSI emulation, and persistent reservations / cluster management
  • OpenGL ES support for SDL front-end, additional framebuffer device options for early boot display without using legacy VGA emulation
  • Live migration support for TPM TIS devices, capping bandwidth usage during post-copy migration, and recovering from a failed post-copy migration
  • Improved latency when using user-mode networking / SLIRP
  • ARM: support for SMMUv3 IOMMU when using ‘virt’ machine type
  • ARM: v8M extensions for VLLDM and VLSTM floating-point instructions, and improved support for AArch64 v8.2 FP16 extensions
  • ARM: support for Scalable Vector Extensions in linux-user mode
  • Microblaze: support for 64-bit address sizes and translation bug fixes
  • PowerPC: PMU support for mac99 machine type and improvements for Uninorth PCI host bridge emulation for Mac machine types
  • PowerPC: preliminary support for emulating POWER9 hash MMU mode when using powernv machine type
  • RISC-V: improvement for privileged ISA emulation
  • s390: support for z14 ZR1 CPU model
  • s390: bpb/ppa15 Spectre mitigations enabled by default for z196 and later CPU models
  • s390: support for configuring consoles via -serial options
  • and lots more…

Thank you to everyone involved!