QEMU 5.1 Release Brings Many Improvements To This Open-Source Virtualization Component

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 12 August 2020 at 07:05 AM EDT. 3 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
QEMU 5.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

There are plenty of changes across the board with QEMU 5.1 while some of the highlights standing out include:

- Support for live migration on AMD EPYC systems with nested virtualization.

- Persistent Memory Region (PMR) support from the NVMe 1.4 specification.

- Support for passing secrets to QEMU via the Linux keyring.

- Support for the ARMv8.5 memory tagging feature and ARMv8.2 TTS2UXN, Raspberry Pi boards now support the USB controller, and other Arm improvements.

- Support for two Loongson 3A CPUs while improving the MIPS performance in general with QEMU 5.1.

- The ability to select POWER10 as a machine type on the IBM PowerPC front. SCV and RFSCV instructions are also supported on the POWER front with this update.

- Support for the AVR CPU architecture and some boards like select Arduino devices.

- A wide variety of RISC-V improvements including support for the SiFive E34, Ibex CPU, HiFive1 Rev B, OpenTitan, and a variety of RISC-V architectural additions.

- Support for protected virtualization / secure extension on IBM s390- with a z16 or Linux One III and using Linux 5.7+ with KVM.

- Improved HVF acceleration support on Apple macOS.

- Various crypto improvements.

- Support for Zstd compression for QCOW2 images when using compress_type=zstd as a creation option.

More details on QEMU 5.1 that was released overnight via QEMU.org.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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