ChangeLog/2.11

Warning: unsupported host systems

Support for Solaris 9 and earlier has been removed.

Support for AIX has been removed.

Support for the ia64 (Itanium) host CPU architecture has been removed.

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 would still be interested in talking to people who want to help us with supporting and improving QEMU on this OS)
• Solaris
• Haiku

System emulation

Deprecated options

• The command-line option "-hdachs" is now deprecated. Use the geometry options of "-device" instead.
• The command-line option "-usbdevice" is now deprecated, use "-device" instead.
• Using "-net dump" for capturing network traffic is now deprecated, use "-object filter-dump" with "-netdev" instead.
• The parameters "serial", "trans", "secs", "heads", "cyls" and "addr" of the "-drive" option are now deprecated. Use the corresponding options of "-device" instead.
• The monitor commands "usb_add" and "usb_del" are now deprecated, use "device_add" and "device_del" instead.
• The monitor commands "host_net_add" and "host_net_remove" are now deprecated. Use "netdev_add" and "netdev_del" instead.
• The "-nodefconfig" option is now deprecated. Use "-no-user-config" 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).

SPARC

• Rework sun4m DMA code to use QEMU's in-built IOMMU/DMA APIs rather than use custom sun4m code
• Implement sunhme (Happy Meal Ethernet) NIC and use it as the default NIC for sun4u
• Update sun4u model to incorporate Simba PCI bridges into PCI topology like a real Ultra 5

NOTE: the sun4u changes may require changes to the QEMU command line. For more information read the QEMU SPARC wiki page section entitled Changes to sun4u machine from 2.11 onwards

Build Information

GIT submodules

When building QEMU directly from a GIT checkout, 'make' will attempt to run 'git' to checkout a number of GIT submodules, which may have implications for some development environment setups.

Known issues

• see Planning/2.11