ChangeLog/1.4

System emulation

Device emulation

• New QOM infrastructure was introduced, exposing a boolean "realized" property.
• The CPU is now a device. Adding CPUs via -device or HMP/QMP device_add is not supported yet.

ARM

• Various minor bugfixes; no new features in this release.

PowerPC

• Pseries: NVRAM support for improved guest installation experience
• G3/G4: Allow dcbzl (for Mac OS X guests)
• e500: Linux guests don't use use SWTLB anymore, freeing memory for real applications
• e500: MSI support
• e500: Allow for up to 31 PCI devices with -M ppce500
• e500: Support idle hcall when running KVM on e500mc or above
• e500: Emulate the EPR facility (e500mc and above)
• PReP: Emulate a full PC87312 Super I/O chipset. This adds a parallel port. Changing the chipset configuration register at runtime is not yet supported.

S390

• New virtio-ccw machine and transport support
• Add -cpu ? support

x86

• testdev?
• xlevel argument for -cpu option currently silently fix-ups it's value if it's less than 0x80000000. Fix-up will be removed in future QEMU versions and users are expected to provide valid xlevel value or QEMU will fail to start.

Xen

• persistent grants support implemented in xen_disk (up to 450% speed in improvement with 15 guests!!);
• safer and correcter flush operation (BLKIF_OP_FLUSH_DISKCACHE) introduced in xen_disk;
• multiple secondary PV consoles support in xen_console;
• many bug fixes.

Live Migration

Move migration from a timer to a thread. Migration was blocking the iothread for too long. Latency of the other threads have improved, and measurements/throughput/latency of migration has also improved.

User-mode emulation

• Fix ppc guest signal handling
• Fix MIPS target