ChangeLog/8.2

System emulation

Removed features and incompatible changes

Consult the 'Removed features' page for details of suggested replacement functionality.

• The HAX accelerator is not supported anymore; the project has been retired. Use "whpx" or "hvf" respectively on Windows and macOS.
• The old machine types pc-i440fx-1.4 to pc-i440fx-1.7 have been removed; use a newer machine type instead
• The -audiodev and -audio command line options are now the only way to specify non-default audio backend settings.
• An audiodev= property is mandatory for all soundcards if the -audio, -audiodev or -nodefaults options are used on the command line.
• When using vnc, you should specify an audiodev= property if you wish to transmit audio through the VNC protocol.

New deprecated options and features

Consult the "Deprecated Features" chapter of the QEMU System Emulation User's Guide for further details of the deprecations and their suggested replacements.

Arm

• Xilinx Versal board now models the CFU/CFI
• New CPU type: cortex-a710
• New architectural features now emulated:
  • FEAT_PACQARMA3
  • FEAT_EPAC
  • FEAT_Pauth2
  • FEAT_FPAC
  • FEAT_FPACCOMBINE
  • FEAT_TIDCP1
  • FEAT_MOPS
  • FEAT_HBC

HPPA

• Block-TLB (BTLB) support for 32-bit PA-RISC CPUs

RISC-V

ISA and Extensions

• Add zmmul isa string
• Add smepmp isa string
• Add RISC-V vector cryptographic instruction set support
• Implement WARL behaviour for mcountinhibit/mcounteren
• Add Zihintntl extension ISA string to DTS
• Fix zfa fleq.d and fltq.d
• Add RISC-V KVM AIA Support
• Fix riscv,pmu DT node path in the virt machine
• Update CSR bits name for svadu extension
• Mark zicond non-experimental
• Align the AIA model to v1.0 ratified spec

Machines

• Remove 'host' CPU from TCG
• riscv_htif Fixup printing on big endian hosts

Fixes and Misc

• Fix page_check_range use in fault-only-first
• Fix upper/lower mtime write calculation
• Make rtc variable names consistent
• Use abi type for linux-user target_ucontext
• Fix satp_mode_finalize() when satp_mode.supported = 0
• Fix non-KVM --enable-debug build
• Add new extensions to hwprobe
• Use accelerated helper for AES64KS1I
• Allocate itrigger timers only once
• Respect mseccfg.RLB for pmpaddrX changes
• Don't read the CSR in riscv_csrrw_do64

Device emulation and assignment

Block devices

• Parallels Format Driver
  • Improved 'qemu-img check' facility
    • Recover from broken data_off in the header
    • Drop clusters outside of the image file
    • De-duplicate clusters located on the same offset in the host file
  • Introduced ability to execute check automatically (if disk image is opened in read/write mode) if corruption is detected by open
  • Cluster allocation is now based on the cluster used bitmap (clusters could be allocated in holes inside image file)
  • Minimal DISCARD & WRITE_ZEROES support

GDBStub

• fixes cases where wrong threads were reported to gdb

Memory backends

• memory-backend-file now supports the "rom" parameter. "share=off,readonly=off,rom=on" can be used for VM-templating with R/O files: open the file R/O, but create writable RAM instead of Read Only Memory (ROM).
• "VM templating" documentation was added

User-mode emulation

alpha

• Emulated /proc/cpuinfo output in linux-user

arm/arm64/aarch64

• Emulated /proc/cpuinfo output in linux-user

Build Information

• Coding style has been updated to allow loop variables

Build Dependencies

• Building QEMU now requires Python 3.8. As a consequence, building on Debian 10 is not supported anymore (unless a newer version of Python is installed by other means).
• Building QEMU now uses the tomli library if Python is older than version 3.11. However, version 2.0.1 is bundled in case tomli is not installed on the host.

Testing and CI

• ccache has been enabled for CI builds

Known issues

• See Planning/8.2