QEMU 1.5 Supports VGA Passthrough, Better USB 3.0

Just three months after the exciting QEMU 1.4 release, QEMU 1.5 is now available with many exciting and new features for those using this open-source software in a virtualized world. There's the VFIO VGA pass-through support, USB 3.0 improvements, and much more.

Using VFIO, QEMU 1.5 now supports VGA pass-through support so that a physical graphics card can be assigned to a guest VM. From there, the GPU's drivers can be used by the guest OS. Various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards have been tested in the VFIO VGA mode for QEMU to date.

Today's QEMU 1.5 release also adds in experimental support for USB 3.0 streams through the nec-usb-xhci controllers and USB-attached SCSI device emulation. There's also rewritten USB device pass-through support using the libusb library. The QEMU 1.5 release also supports TPM (Trusted Platform Module) emulation on supported x86 hardware.

The Tiny Code Generator (TCG) found in QEMU 1.5 now also supports using the SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, PCMULQDQ, AES-NI, BMX, and ADX instruction set extensions.

Other QEMU 1.5 changes include SCSI and network improvements, initial support for KVM on ARM in conjunction with the Linux 3.9+ kernel and an ARM Cortex-A15 SoC, improvements to the VersatilePB and Realview boards, TCG PPC performance improvements, and much more.

The changes here mention just some of the great work and new features found in QEMU 1.5. For a complete list of all the exciting features for QEMU 1.5, visit QEMU.org.