ChangeLog/2.10

Warning of unsupported host systems

NetBSD is again a supported system.

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 CPU architectures:

• ia64

and the OSes:

• GNU/kFreeBSD
• DragonFly BSD
• OpenBSD
• Solaris
• AIX
• Haiku

System emulation

Deprecated options

• The -hdachs option is now deprecated
• The monitor commands "usb_add" and "usb_del" are now deprecated, use "device_add" and "device_del" instead.
• The command-line option "-usbdevice" is now deprecated, use "-device" instead.

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).

ARM

• M profile exception return is implemented correctly
• M profile emulation now supports the MPU
• The ASPEED SoC includes an emulated FTGMAC100 network card.

OpenRISC

• Support for shadow registers, idle states, numcores and coreid registers, and the EVBAR and EPH registers.
• Support for migration/savevm

PowerPC

• QEMU now includes a VGA driver for Mac machine types (g3beige/mac99, respectively OldWorld and NewWorld)
• Multi-threaded TCG is enabled for PPC targets.
• Support for POWER9 guests with KVM
• Partial support for POWER9 guests with TCG.
• The powernv machine includes a more complete device tree.

s390

• Basic support for using channel-attached 3270 "green screen" devices through the "x-terminal3270" device. Only x3270 is supported as client.
• CSS ids are visible in "info qtree" and as QOM properties.
• IPL supports the "bootindex" property via LOADPARM.
• Support for vfio-ccw (channel device passthrough)
• TCG can use host atomic operations for s390 "LOAD AND x" and "COMPARE SWAP" operations.
• TCG implements EXECUTE completely
• TCG supports LOAD PROGRAM PARAMETER, extended facilities and several other instructions.

SH

• TCG can use host atomic instructions for tas.b

x86

• GDB can now look at SSE registers
• IOMMU?

Xtensa

• -serial can be used to direct the sim machine's console output to a character device.

Device emulation and assignment

ACPI

• New "-numa cpu" option quickly lets you assign CPUs to nodes by socket/core/thread id (for example a 2-socket x86 machine would be "-numa cpu,node-id=0,socket-id=0 "-numa cpu,node-id=1,socket-id=1" independent of the number of sockets per core.
• Support for ACPI distance info.

Block devices

• The emulated NVMe device supports the Write Zeroes command.
• The emulated NVMe device supports Controller Memory Buffers (currently only Submission Queue support is enabled).

Graphics

• qxl and virtio-gpu support two new properties for the default display resolution, xres and yes

Input devices

• input-linux supports absolute events

IPMI

• Support for FRUs
• SDRs can be loaded from a file.

PCI/PCIe

• PCI bridges are presenting again a standard hotplug controller (SHPC) after it was removed in 2.9.

virtio

• vhost-user supports IOTLB messages.

Xen

• Support for the Xen 9pfs backend.
• QEMU uses libxendevicemodel when available.

Monitor

• New debugging command "info ramblock"

Network

• slirp supports a minimal NC-SI (Network Controller Sideband Interface) backend

Block devices and tools

• Image locking?
• Support for the vxhs network protocol
• Progress information is printed when qemu-img receives a SIGINFO (on operating systems that support it).

User-mode emulation

• Fixes to many system calls.

Guest agent

• New commands 'guest-get-host-name', 'guest-get-users', 'guest-get-timezone'

Known issues

• see Planning/2.10
• The emulation of Raspberry Pi is still missing some features which are required to run newer versions of Raspbian.