QEMU version 5.2.0 released

08 Dec 2020

We’d like to announce the availability of the QEMU 5.2.0 release. This release contains 3200+ commits from 216 authors.

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

Note that QEMU has switched build systems so you will need to install ninja to compile it. See the “Build Information” section of the Changelog for more information about this change.

Highlights include:

  • block: support for using qemu-storage-daemon as a vhost-user-blk device backend, and new ‘block-export-add’ QMP command which replaces now-deprecated ‘nbd-server-add’ with support for qemu-storage-daemon
  • block: qcow2 support for subcluster-based allocation (via extended_l2=on qemu-img option), improvements to NBD client network stalls, and qemu-nbd support for exposing multiple dirty bitmaps at once
  • migration: higher-bandwidth encrypted migration via TLS+multifd, new ‘block-bitmap-mapping’ option for finer-grained control over which bitmaps to migrate, and support for migration over a ‘vsock’ device (for nested environments and certain hardware classes)
  • qemu-ga: support for guest-get-devices, guest-get-disks, and guest-ssh-{get,add-remove}-authorized-keys commands.
  • virtiofs: virtiofsd support for new options to control how xattr names are seen by the guest, specify sandboxing alternative to pivot_root, and allowing different host mounts to be seen as separate submounts in the guest to avoid inode clashes
  • ARM: new board support for mp2-an386 (Cortex-M4 based), mp2-an500 (Cortex-M7 based), raspi3ap (Raspberry Pi 3 model A+), raspi0 (Raspberry Pi Zero), raspi1ap (Raspberry Pi A+), and npcm750-evb/quanta-gsj (Nuvoton iBMC)
  • ARM: ARMv8.2 FEAT_FP16 (half-precision floating point) support for AArch32 (already supported for AArch64)
  • ARM: virt: support for kvm-steal-time accounting
  • HPPA: support for booting NetBSD and older Linux distros like debian-0.5 and debian-0.6.1
  • PowerPC: pseries: improved support for user-specified NUMA distance topologies
  • RISC-V: live migration support
  • RISC-V: experimental hypervisor support updated to v0.6.1 and other improvements
  • RISC-V: support for NUMA sockets on virt/Spike machine types
  • s390: KVM support for diagnose 0x318 instruction, TCG support for additional z14 instructions
  • s390: vfio-pci devices now report real hardware features for functions instead of just emulated values
  • Xtensa: DFPU co-processor with single/double-precision FP opcodes is now supported
  • x86: improved support for asynchronous page faults via new kvm-async-pf-int -cpu option
  • and lots more…

Thank you to everyone involved!