ChangeLog/0.15

0.15.1

• (commit 82b2b32) Version 0.15.1
• (commit 4a81ab8) qed: fix use-after-free during l2 cache commit
• (commit 68e3508) sdl: Fix termination in -no-shutdown mode
• (commit fb52404) Fix termination by signal with -no-shutdown
• (commit 3363983) Add support for finding libpng via pkg-config.
• (commit 672aefe) Check for presence of compiler -pthread flag.
• (commit 6a10ccc) Allow overriding the location of Samba's smbd.
• (commit 7095e71) Fix linker scripts
• (commit 91b31d6) Fix install(1) usage to be compatible with OpenBSD's install(1).
• (commit b89f4a7) Fix qjson test of solidus encoding
• (commit fbdd7c8) configure: Copy test data to build directory
• (commit e19a4e8) monitor: fix build breakage for !CONFIG_VNC
• (commit ff5aced) monitor: fix build breakage with --disable-vnc
• (commit 2af86a2) Fix forcing multicast msgs to loopback on OpenBSD.
• (commit a80f53a) user: Restore debug usage message for '-d ?' in user mode emulation

0.15.0

Targets

• New targets added: Lattice Mico32 (LM32) and UniCore32.

ARM

• Many bugs in Neon and other ARMv6 and ARMv7 instructions have been fixed
• Floating point instructions now generally handle NaNs and floating point status flags correctly
• Dummy implementations of cp15 performance counters and cp14 debug registers mean we can boot more recent Linux kernels that probe for these features
• SA-1110/SA-1100 support has been added
• New machine models: ARM Versatile Express (machine "vexpress-a9"), Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (machine "collie")

LM32

• Basic support for LM32 EVR evaluation board
• Full-featured support for the Milkymist SoC including video rendering.
• Almost complete opcode testsuite

SPARC

• Sparc32: Improvements to OpenBIOS make Solaris 8 boot possible.
• Sparc64: fix sdivx and udivx instructions, enabling booting HelenOS up to the command prompt (commit 8e91ed308062e742610e4cfdfd4a09bc045ead45).
• Minor Sparc32 and Sparc64 fixes.

x86

• Xen support merged (http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2011/05/13/xen-support-upstreamed-to-qemu/)

Hosts

ARM

• Support QEMU's host C code being compiled in Thumb mode (as some gccs do by default)

KVM

Common

• Countless fixes ported over from qemu-kvm, core is now shared with that tree, i.e. has the same quality
• Pimped up threading model, now fully synchronized with qemu-kvm tree
• Removed dependency on external kernel headers, all supported KVM features are now built into the binary

x86

• Paravirtual kvmclock fixes
• Stable guest TSC across migration
• Support for SMEP CPU feature
• Support for VIA CPU features
• Reworked & fixed MCE support

Devices

virtio-serial

• Various fixes for hot-unplug of ports
• Disallow generic ports at id 0: port number 0 is reserved for console ports for backward compatibility; '-device virtserialport,nr=0' is now not allowed.
• Allow re-use of a chardev after a port using it gets unplugged
• Add trace events

RTC

• MC146818 (for PCs): Follow host clock resets to the past immediately (instead of freezing the clock)

Balloon

• Fix use-after-free bug that lead to qemu crash when 'balloon 0' was issued in the monitor
• Multiple balloon devices are now forbidden; it doesn't make sense to have more than one device at a time.
• Negative balloon values are now rejected. The previous behaviour was to silently deflate the balloon (negative values were parsed as very high positive values)
• Fix memory leaks on exit or unplug of the virtio-balloon device
• Fix migration after unplugging of the virtio-balloon device. Previously, the destination aborted migration for a missing section.

Block Layer

• Added missing -drive options to the man page
• Expose live snapshot support in QMP using the snapshot-blkdev-sync command (commit d967b2f)
• Fixed removable media support to not cache the media size. Before this fix, the guest OS would see the old CD-ROM size even after changing the medium. (commit 46a4e4e)

qemu-img

• qemu-img convert and rebase now support the -p option which enables progress display (commit 6b837bc)
• qemu-img commit, convert and rebase now support the -t option which allows to specify a cache mode that should be used to open the image (commit 661a0f7)
• The performance of qemu-img convert has been improved (commit f6a00aa)

Block Drivers

qcow2

• Improved the performance of creating/deleting internal snapshots (commit 93913df)

qed

• Support for growing images with qemu-img resize (commit 77a5a0001bd9eaee9da7dc8f0b69702d56b0cc67)
• Periodically flush and clear need check bit to reduce chance of leaving image files dirty on power failure (commit 6f321e93abb27b4e7ceb228b4204aa304e95daad)
• Fix consistency check on 32-bit hosts (commit 19dfc44a94f759848a0f7de7378b2f8b9af6b5d0)

VMDK

• Support for the monolithicFlat subformat (commit 7fa60fa)

Sheepdog

• Can now preallocate images during creation (commit a8e0fdd)

RBD

• Use the higher level librbd instead of just librados (commit ad32e9c)

IDE Emulation

• Added support for the TRIM command (commit d353fb7)
• Instead of the device ide-drive for both hard disks and CD-ROMs we have now separate ide-hd and ide-cd devices (commit 1f56e32)
• Fixed confusion between the Busmaster IDE status register and internal error state, which could lead to crashes (commit def9379)

CDROM Emulation

• Many fixes to comply with ATAPI specification
• GET_EVENT_STATUS_NOTIFICATION: Implement 'media' subcommand that helps report tray open/close, media present/absent states to guests. Newer Linux guests (kernels 2.6.38+) rely on this command to revalidate discs.
• Major code refactoring and cleanup

virtio-blk

• The serial number of the drive is now exposed as a qdev property (commit a8686a9)

SCSI Disk Emulation

• Instead of the device scsi-disk for both hard disks and CD-ROMs we have now separate scsi-hd and scsi-cd devices (commit b443ae6)

Networking

User space (slirp)

• Fixed DHCP support in restrict (host-only) mode
• Ping packet forwarding to external hosts via unprivileged ICMP sockets of Linux 3.0

QMP / Monitor

• Support for two new QMP commands: inject-nmi (commit a404666457b54142d6cfe8302bcded9be4cda379) and snapshot-blkdev-sync (commit d967b2f14f238c24264fa73d02e9b0dde0b19506)
• Fixed some issues with the JSON parser (several commits, first one here)
• Added the guest agent (commit e3d4d25206a13ca48936e4357a53591997ce6d57)

Tracing

• Make simpletrace.py a Python module for trace analysis scripts (blog), (commit 59da66849215eccf1dce2154c84f217a3c39678b)
• Make 'simple' backend thread-safe (commit 0b5538c300a56c3cfb33022840fe0b4968147e7a)
• Add tracetool --probe-prefix optional argument to prefix DTrace probe names (commit e323c93edf3abb67c37b8e08b78da4835880f12e)

Linux-user

• Added support for ppoll, sched_{g,s}etaffinity, epoll, pselect6, prlimit64 syscalls
• Add s390x and unicore32 linux-user targets
• Fix loading binaries from Linux/sparc64 rootfs (commit cf973e469bd9d47c0460347764c1315a6180e13c)
• Numerous bugfixes

New build dependencies (mandatory and optional)

• glib-2.0 (mandatory). Used only for guest agent so far, and on platforms that lack ucontext interface (e.g. BSD).
• libcurl 7.15.4 or better (optional, required for CURL block driver support)
• spice 0.6.0 or better (optional)
• libnss3 (network security services from Mozilla project) (unused?). Detected and linked for --enable-smartcard-nss, but apparently not used