QEMU 6.2 On The Way With SGX For VMs, Apple Silicon, More RISC-V

This week marked the release of QEMU 6.2-rc0 as the first test candidate for this upcoming update that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The rc0 milestone marks the hard feature freeze on QEMU 6.2. There will now be weekly release candidates until QEMU 6.2.0 is ready to ship as stable, which should be around mid-December.

Among the changes and improvements coming with QEMU 6.2 include:

- In conjunction with a capable KVM, there is now support for Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) in the virtual machine.

- On macOS hosts with Apple Silicon SoCs, QEMU now supports the HVF accelerator for running AArch64 guests.

- The Fujitsu A64FX high-performance ARM processor is now supported by TCG, QEMU's Tiny Code Generator.

- Support for more RISC-V instructions, SiFive PWM support, and other improvements for handling this open-source processor ISA.

- Improved IBM POWER10 support.

- The Intel Snow Ridge v4 CPU model has been added.

The tentative list of QEMU 6.2 changes can be found via the project's Wiki with the in-progress release notes.