QEMU 8.0 hatches more support for Arm and RISC-V

Developers of nan unfastened root instrumentality emulator QEMU person hatched nan project's 8.0 release.

QEMU is simply a instrumentality emulator that tin tally impermanent machines of a different architecture to its host. The package is besides tin of serving arsenic a hypervisor.

Version 8.0, released past week, doesn't change immoderate fundamentals but does adhd support for plentifulness of hardware and instructions.

Some of nan additions are simple, specified arsenic nan expertise to grip Intel's Sapphire Rapids fourth-gen Xeon silicon, aliases emulate Arm's Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52 processors.

Others are much subtle, specified arsenic support for FEAT_EVT and FEAT_FGT – in-silico features Arm offers to support virtualization.

As liking grows successful nan RISC-V architecture, nan maturity of its package ecosystem becomes progressively important. Developers whitethorn truthful beryllium buoyed to study that QEMU has added support for nan OpenTitan silicon guidelines of spot project, and nan OpenSBI Supervisor Binary Interface effort that allows nan OS connected a RISC-V instrumentality to interact pinch nan architecture's supervisor execution situation and nan higher-privileged resources disposable there.

QEMU 8.0 tin besides emulate PolarFire RISC-V FPGAs. The merchandise besides adds what nan project's developers person described arsenic "wide ranges of fixes covering PMP propagation for TLB, mret exceptions, uncompressed instructions, and different emulation/virtualization improvements."

The package besides offers thing for mainframe users, and successful this merchandise adds support for asynchronous teardown of representation of unafraid KVM guests during reboot connected s390x, positive improved zPCI passthrough instrumentality handling.

• systemd 253: You're looking astatine nan early of endeavor Linux footwear processes
• Xen and nan creation of hypervisor upgrades
• KVM flaw connected AMD servers gave malicious VMs a way to return complete nan host
• QEMU brings backmost its one-OS-a-day virtual advent calendar

All of nan above, and nan galore different features added successful QEMU 8.0, flowed from nan keyboards of 238 contributors who together made complete 2,800 commits.

QEMU is astir often recovered connected Linux alongside nan KVM hypervisor, pinch nan 2 moving manus successful mitt to connection emulation and virtualization.

As The Register checked immoderate facts for this article, we noticed a nexus connected QEMU's tract to its advent calendar – a bi-annual dainty that offered a caller virtual instrumentality image to download successful nan weeks starring up to Christmas.

Sadly, nan almanac did not look arsenic scheduled past year. The Register understands nan squad down nan almanac was engaged pinch different projects up of past Christmas. Hopefully it will return successful 2024.

While you hold for nan almanac to return, QEMU 8.0 tin beryllium had here. ®