Qemu 8.0 released with major improvements
The release of Qemu 8.0, the emulator that allows launching programs assembled for one hardware platform on a system with a different architecture, was recently announced by the Qemu development team.
Originally created by Fabrice Bellard to support launching the X86 of the executable Linux files on architectures different from the X86, Qemu has undergone significant development over the years, adding support for full emulation for 14 hardware architectures and over 400 emulated hardware devices.
With the preparation of version 8.0, over 2,800 changes were made from 238 developers, and key improvements were added:
– The emulator for the x86 architecture now supports launching guest systems of Xen surrounded by hypervizer KVM and Linux 5.12+Nuclei.
– The classic TCG code generator for the X86 architecture now supports the CPUID flags FSRM, FZRM, FSRS, and FSRC, as well as the new model CPU Intel sapphire rapids (Intel 7).
– In the ARM emulator, support has been added for CPU Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52 and a new type of emulated Olimex STM32 H405 machines. GDBStub has also added support for systemic registers for architecture m-profile (microcontrollers profile).
– In the emulator of the RISC-V architecture, the implementation of the emulated cars Opentitan, Polarfire, and Opensbi has been updated, and support for additional sets of processor instructions (ISA) and extensions has been added.
– The block device Qemu-NBD now has increased efficiency of TCP when using TLS.
– The initial support of OpenBSD and NetBSD has been added to the agent for guest systems.
Overall, Qemu 8.0 comes with significant upgrades that can improve the performance of code execution in an isolated environment, making it close to the hardware system, facilitating the launching of programs across architectures.
Sources:
– Qemu-devel, https://lists.nongnu.orch/html/qemu-devel/2023-04/msg02755.html
– Qemu Wiki, https://wiki.qemu.org/changelog/8.0