QEMU 3.0 Is Being Prepared For Release In August

The march to QEMU 3.0 is now underway following discussions at the end of last year for jumping to the v3.0 milestone after the long-running v2.x series. The first release candidate is now available and marks a hard feature freeze for the QEMU 3.0 milestone.

QEMU 3.0-RC0 was just tagged, which marks the first release candidate and hard feature freeze -- the soft feature freeze had begun last week.

QEMU 3.0 isn't all that dramatic compared to the QEMU 2.12 release from the end of April. QEMU 3.0 though is doing away with GTK2 user-interface support now that its GTK3 support is in good-standing. QEMU 3.0 is also dropping SDL 1.2 with the SDL 2.0 support also being in good shape. QEMU 3.0 additionally is now defaulting to the --accel kvm:tcg mode rather than running just in the TCG (Tiny Code Generator) mode by default.

Additionally, deprecated interfaces and features that have been in such a state for at least two releases are being removed. QEMU deprecated features are outlined here.

QEMU 3.0-RC0 is available via Git. At least three more release candidates are expected ahead of QEMU 3.0.0 and that official release should arrive by the middle of August.