ChangeLog/5.2

IMPORTANT NOTE: in this release we have switched our build system to Meson. Building should be broadly unchanged for most users, but please see the 'Build Information' section of the changelog for details.

System emulation

Arm

• The SMMUv3 model now supports SMMUv3.2 range invalidation

HPPA

• Fix firmware to boot NetBSD
• Fix many artist framebuffer out-of-bounds accesses
• Fix various artist screen updates when running dtwm on HP-UX
• SeaBIOS-hppa firmware now includes a version check

RISC-V

• Improvements to the Ibex (OpenTitan) PLIC
• OpenSBI v0.8 included
• Generic OpenSBI platform used when no -bios argument is supplied
• A dummy L2 cache controller for the sifive_u is now included
• PMPCFG CSR setting bug fixed for RV64
• Improvements to the floating point helpers
• Experimental Hypervisor support updated to v0.6.1
• Support for NUMA sockets on Virt and Spike Machines

Migration

• A new 'block-bitmap-mapping' migration parameter is added, allowing finer control of which bitmaps to migrate, even when node names differ between source and destination.

Block device backends and tools

• qcow2 files now support extended L2 entries that allow subcluster-based allocation (enable with extended_l2=on when creating the image).

Build Information

• The build system is now partly based on Meson. However, building is still done with configure and make as in previous versions of QEMU.
• Binaries for emulators are placed in the root build directory, for example as qemu-system-ppc instead of ppc-softmmu/qemu-system-ppc. Symbolic links from the old binary are preserved to simplify the transition.
• In-tree builds are not supported anymore. The build system will try to cater for ./configure && make && make install by building QEMU in a directory named build, but you are encouraged to switch to out-of-tree builds instead.

Build Dependencies

• GNU Make 3.82 is now the minimum supported release for building QEMU. Note that this version is not included in macOS and must be installed from packaging systems such as Homebrew.
• Python setuptools are now required to build QEMU.

Known issues

• see Planning/5.2