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!

• releases
• qemu 3.0

Ever since I started working on QEMU, a small directory called tests/tcg has been in a perpetually broken state. It contains tests that exercise QEMU’s ability to work across architectures using the power of the Tiny Code Generator. However as these tests needed to be compiled for the guest architectures and not the host architecture—this is known as cross-compiling—most developers never ran them. As the tests were hardly ever built inevitably a certain amount of bit-rot set in.

If you used QEMU in the past, you are probably familiar with the -net command line option, which can be used to configure a network connection for the guest, or with with the -netdev option, which configures a network back-end. Yet, QEMU v2.12 introduces a third way to configure NICs, the -nic option.

We’d like to announce the availability of the QEMU 2.12.0 release. This release contains 2700+ commits from 204 authors.