QEMU version 4.2.0 released

13 Dec 2019

We would like to announce the availability of the QEMU 4.2.0 release. This release contains 2200+ commits from 198 authors.

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

Highlights include:

  • TCG plugin support for passive monitoring of instructions and memory accesses
  • block: NBD block driver now supports more efficient handling of copy-on-read requests
  • block: NBD server optimizations for copying of sparse images, and general fixes/improvements for NBD server/client implementations
  • block/crypto: improved performance for AES-XTS encryption for LUKS disk encryption
  • vfio-pci support for “failover_pair_id” property for easier migration of VFIO devices
  • virtio-mmio now supports virtio-compatible v2 personality and virtio 1.1 support for packed virtqueues
  • 68k: new “next-cube” machine for emulating a classic NeXTcube
  • 68k: new “q800” machine for emulating Macintosh Quadro 800
  • ARM: new “ast2600-evb” machine for emulating Aspeed AST2600 SoC
  • ARM: semihosting v2.0 support with STDOUT_STDERR/EXIT_EXTENDED extensions
  • ARM: KVM support for more than 256 CPUs
  • ARM: “virt” machine now supports memory hotplugging
  • ARM: improved TCG emulation performance
  • ARM: KVM support for SVE SIMD instructions on SVE-capable hardware
  • PowerPC: emulation support for mffsce, mffscrn, and mffscrni POWER9 instructions
  • PowerPC: “powernv” machine now supports Homer and OCC SRAM system devices
  • RISC-V: “-initrd” argument now supported
  • RISC-V: debugger can now see all architectural state
  • s390: emulation support for IEP (Instruction Execution Protection)
  • SPARC: “sun4u” IOMMU now supports “invert endianness” bit
  • x86: VMX features can be enabled/disabled via “-cpu” flags
  • x86: new “microvm” machine that uses virtio-mmio instead of PCI for use as baseline for performance optimizations
  • x86: emulation support for AVX512 BFloat16 extensions
  • x86: new CPU models for Denverton (server-class Atom-based SoC), Snowridge, and Dhyana
  • x86: macOS Hypervisor.framework support (“-accel hvf”) now considered stable
  • xtensa: new “virt” machine type
  • xtensa: call0 ABI support for user-mode emulation
  • and lots more…

Thank you to everyone involved!