ChangeLog/2.12

Warning: unsupported host systems

Unsupported host setups are CPU and operating systems which we do not have access to and are thus unable to test. They will continue to work in this release (though configure will warn you about the unsupported status), but in a future QEMU release we may drop support for those hosts unless somebody volunteers to help us with maintaining them (and can provide build/CI machines).

This affects the OSes:

• GNU/kFreeBSD
• DragonFly BSD
• OpenBSD (we have a build system for OpenBSD but stil need people who want to help us with supporting and improving QEMU on this OS)
• Solaris
• Haiku

System emulation

Incompatible changes

• The deprecated command line option "-no-kvm-pit" has been removed (it only emitted a warning since QEMU 1.3.0)
• The HMP commands "usb_add" and "usb_del" have been removed. Use "device_add" and "device_del" as replacement instead.

Deprecated options

• The parameters "serial", "trans", "secs", "heads", "cyls" and "addr" of the "-drive" option are now deprecated. Use the corresponding options of "-device" instead.
• The "-nodefconfig" option is now deprecated. Use "-no-user-config" instead.

Consult the "Deprecated Features" appendix for the full list of historically deprecated features/options.

Future incompatible changes

• Three options are using different names on the command line and in configuration file. In particular:
  • The "acpi" configuration file section matches command-line option "acpitable";
  • The "boot-opts" configuration file section matches command-line option "boot";
  • The "smp-opts" configuration file section matches command-line option "smp".

-readconfig will standardize on the name for the command line option.

• Behavior of automatic calculation of SMP topology when some SMP topology options for -smp are omitted (sockets, cores, threads) will change in the future. If guest ABI needs to be preserved on upgrades while using the SMP topology options, users should either set set all options explicitly (sockets, cores, threads), or omit all of them.
• Devices "allwinner-a10", "pc87312", "ssi-sd" will be configured with explicit properties instead of implicitly. This is unlikely to affect users.
• For x86, specifying a CPUID feature with both "+feature/-feature" and "feature=on/off" will cause a warning. The current behavior for this combination ("+feature/-feature" wins over "feature=on/off") will be changed so that "+feature" and "-feature" will be synonyms for "feature=on" and "feature=off" respectively).
• The read-only block drivers "bochs", "cloop" and "dmg" as well as "rbd" and "vvfat" in certain read-only configurations will no longer enable read-only mode automatically. It will be necessary to specify "read-only=on" explicitly on the command line and in QMP commands for the setup to keep working; the default "read-only=off" setting will result in an error.
• On s390x, using KVM with a Linux host kernel version < 3.15 has been broken since QEMU version 2.10. This will not be fixed unless a need is communicated (otherwise the code will be removed in the near future, so that you need at least Linux kernel version 3.15 on the host to run KVM on System z)

s390

TCG

• Rework of interrupt handling
• Implementation of missing instructions: SCKPF, STCRW, SAL, SCHM,

KVM

• allow for systems larger that 7.999TB

Known issues

• see Planning/2.12