ChangeLog/6.1

System emulation

Incompatible changes

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

• The 'moxie' target has been removed without replacement. There were no known users of this CPU type anymore and no binaries available which could be used for testing.
• The 'lm32' target has been removed without replacement. The only public user of this architecture was the milkymist project, which has been completely inactive for years, and there was never an upstream Linux port.
• The 'unicore32' target has been removed without replacement. Support for this CPU was removed from the upstream Linux kernel a while ago already, and there is no available upstream toolchain to build binaries for it.
• The 'sheepdog' driver has been removed. The corresponding upstream server project is no longer maintained. Users are recommended to switch to an alternative distributed block device driver such as RBD.

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

• New Aspeed machines: rainier-bmc and quanta-q7l1-bmc
• Model for Aspeed's Hash and Crypto Engine
• The mps3-an524 board now supports the alternate memory map (via "-machine remap=QSPI")
• SVE2 is now emulated, including bfloat16 support
• FEAT_I8MM is now emulated (integer matrix multiply accumulate)
• FEAT_TLBIOS is now emulated (TLB invalidate instructions in Outer Shareable domain)
• FEAT_TLBRANGE is now emulated (TLB range invalidate instructions)
• FEAT_BF16 and FEAT_AA32BF16 are now emulated (bfloat16 support for AArch64 and AArch32)

PowerPC

• With recent enough guests now able to (sometimes) detect hot unplug failures on pseries machine type
• Greatly increased maximum cpu count for pseries; it's now basically arbitrarily high - you will hit KVM or emulation limits before a fixed cut off
• Updated ppce500 firmware image, which should fix pci support
• Added 'pegasos2' machine type emulating the Genesi/bPlan Pegasos II board
• 'mac99' machine now limited to 2GiB of RAM (previously it was allowed on the command line, although it probably wouldn't work properly)

RISC-V

• Clenaup some left over v1.9 code
• Documentation improvements
• Support for the shakti_c machine
• Internal cleanup of the CSR accesses
• Updates to the OpenTitan platform
• Support for the virtio-vga
• Fix for the saturate subtract in vector extensions (https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1923629)
• Experimental support for the ePMP spec
• A range of other internal code cleanups and bug fixes

s390x

• The s390-ccw bios can now be compiled with Clang, too

x86

• New CPU model versions added with XSAVES enabled: Skylake-Client-v4, Skylake-Server-v5, Cascadelake-Server-v5, Cooperlake-v2, Icelake-Client-v3, Icelake-Server-v5, Denverton-v3, Snowridge-v3, Dhyana-v2
• hv-passthrough won't enable Hyper-V feature flags that are unknown to QEMU

x86_64

• family/model/stepping of CPU models qemu64 (all accelerators) and max (TCG only) were updated to values corresponding to a 64-bit AMD processor (fixes #191)

Device emulation and assignment

I2C

• Modified the I2C base to allow I2C muxes to be added
• Added support for the pca9546 and pca9548 I2C muxes.

TCG Plugins

• some memory leaks plugged in example plugins
• syscall plugin can now summarise totals

Block device backends and tools

• Fix a regression in qemu-nbd and qemu-storage-daemon handling file descriptors via socket activation.

TCG

• tricore now has check-tcg support and tests
• hexagon now has check-tcg support and tests
• fixed bug in replay HMP commands to accept full length icount

Build Information

• CentOS 7 is no longer a supported build platform

Container Based Builds

• improvements to binfmt_misc containers

Build Dependencies

• minimum nettle is now 3.4
• minimum libgcrypt is now 1.8.0
• minimum gnutls is now 3.5.18
• minimum glib is now 2.56
• minimum gcc is now 7.5.0
• minimum clang is now 6.0
• minimum xcode clang is now 10.0
• minimum libssh is now 0.8.7

Known issues

• see Planning/6.1