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
• QEMU does not create default audio backends anymore if any of the -audiodev, -audio or -nodefaults options are used on the command line. However, audio can now be used to specify the default audio backend in lieu of the (previously deprecated) QEMU_AUDIO_* environment variables.
• If an audio backend is created with ``-audiodev``, each audio client (a sound card or VNC) that wants to use it should specify an audiodev= property. Previously, the first audiodev command line option would be used as a fallback.

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.
• The libfdt library is no longer bundled with QEMU. However, if QEMU is configured with --enable-download and the library is absent, then it will be downloaded and built together if any emulators need it.

Testing and CI

• ccache has been enabled for CI builds

Known issues

• See Planning/8.2