The open-source QEMU 8.0 device emulator and virtualization software was released on April 19, bringing various new features and improvements to ARM, RISC-V, x86, s390x and HPPA platforms.
QEMU (Quick Emulator) is one of the mainstream equipment emulation software in the industry. It can run operating systems and programs that support other architectures on a physical machine of one architecture (such as X86 PC), so that the software can run on different hardware architectures without awareness. For software developers, QEMU can provide a platform for system execution under different hardware architectures, as well as a software cross-architecture integrated testing environment to improve software development efficiency and maturity.
A year after the release of QEMU 7.0, the QEMU 8.0 release brings improved support for ARM and RISC-V architectures. For ARM, added emulation support for FEAT_EVT, FEAT_FGT, and AArch32 ARMv8-R; CPU emulation support for Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52, support for the new Olimex STM32 H405 device type, gdbstub support for M-profile system registers, and more.
For RISC-V architectures, QEMU 8.0 brings updated device support for OpenTitan, PolarFire and OpenSBI, additional ISA and extensions to support smstateen, support for native debug icount triggers, cache-related PMU events in virtual mode, Zawrs / Svadu / T-Head / Zicond extensions and ACPI etc.
Additionally, RISC-V received several fixes covering PMP propagation for the TLB, mret exceptions, uncompressed instructions, and other emulation/virtualization improvements.
For HP Precision Architecture (HPPA) platforms, QEMU version 8.0 improves fid (floating point awareness) instruction support and 32-bit emulation.
On the other hand, the s390x (IBM Z) platform supports asynchronous teardown of secure KVM guest memory during reboot and improved handling of zPCI passthrough devices.
For x86, the latest QEMU 8.0 release introduces new Intel SapphireRapids CPU support, support for Xen guests under KVM with Linux kernel 5.12 and higher, and TCG support for FSRM, FZRM, FSRS, and FSRC CPUID flags.
Among other notable changes, QEMU 8.0 improves virtio-mem, supports using preallocation with live migration, updates experimental migration support for VFIO migration protocol v2, and improves TCP efficiency and use of qemu-nbd Efficiency over TLS.
