QEMU 11.1 has been released as the first maintenance update to the 11.x series for this open-source machine emulator and virtualizer, with the headline change being the addition of RISC-V big-endian target support.
The release also expands the architecture’s ISA coverage with support for the draft Zbr extension, Zvfbfa, KVM support for Zicbop and BFloat16 extensions, fractional LMUL handling for vector SHA instructions, and several disassembler improvements.
RISC-V machine support has grown, as QEMU 11.1 adds support for the K230 board, updates OpenSBI to version 1.8.1, introduces Tenstorrent mvendorid support, and includes a large number of fixes across the IOMMU, interrupt handling, page-table walking, vector instructions, and other low-level areas.
On the Arm side, Apple HVF users can now use nested virtualization on the virt board, and qemu-system-aarch64 can boot a 32-bit guest on a 64-bit TCG CPU by using the aarch64=off CPU property.
QEMU 11.1 also introduces experimental emulation of the GICv5 interrupt controller and adds support for loading a UEFI shim through the standard -shim argument. On NVIDIA Tegra241 systems, Command Queue Virtualization support can provide individual virtual machines with dedicated hardware SMMUv3 command queues.
The Arm CPU emulation side has also been expanded with a long list of newly supported architectural features, including several FP8, SME, SSVE, Memory Tagging Extension, and RME capabilities.
PowerPC users get some notable changes too. Power11 is now the default CPU for pseries machines, while PowerNV11 becomes the default PowerNV machine. The release also adds MPIPL support for PowerNV, includes a nested MMU model, updates the SLOF firmware, and removes the deprecated Power8E and Power8NVL CPUs.
USB emulation receives several security-related fixes, covering a possible use-after-free issue and an infinite loop or crash issue in usb-redir, as well as an out-of-bounds heap access in the XHCI sysbus device. Virtio-gpu gets a use-after-free fix of its own.
Live migration has seen another round of improvements with QEMU 11.1, which adds the x-rdma-chunk-size parameter to control RDMA migration chunk sizes and enhances query-migrate to report system-wide remaining bytes along with expected downtime calculations that include VFIO device state.
Several migration bugs have been fixed as well, including a crash when multifd and zerocopy were enabled together, a possible hang in the POSTCOPY_DEVICE state, a crash during a second migration after the first one was canceled, and a rare VFIO migration crash.
On the display side, the release includes a new standalone qemu-vnc server capable of exporting -display dbus. Virtual console character devices also gain an encoding option for CP437 or UTF-8, while the VT100 emulator now supports UTF-8 input with CP437 rendering. GTK console hotplug handling has been improved too.
Finally, a large collection of architecture-specific fixes rounds out that work, touching signal handling, networking, coredumps, floating-point state, ioctl validation, auxiliary vectors, and compatibility among platforms including RISC-V, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, SH4, Xtensa, s390x, Alpha, and LoongArch.
For additional details, see the changelog. QEMU 11.1’s source code is available for download from the project’s GitHub page.
