QEMU Hardware Emulator Released Version 5.1 With Many Improvements

Version 5.1.0 of the QEMU hardware emulator is out. This release contains 2500+ commits from 235 authors.
QEMU 5.1.0

Above all, QEMU 5.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack. When used as a machine emulator, it can run OSes and programs made for one machine on a different machine. By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance indeed.

This release contains 2500+ commits from 235 authors.

What’s new in QEMU 5.1

There are plenty of changes. Some of the highlights standing out include:

  • Persistent Memory Region (PMR) support from the NVMe 1.4 specification.
  • 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 live migration on AMD EPYC systems with nested virtualization.
  • 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.
  • Support for passing secrets to QEMU via the Linux keyring.
  • Various crypto improvements.
  • Support for Zstd compression for QCOW2 images when using compress_type=zstd as a creation option.

In addition, the full list of changes are available here.

In conclusion, QEMU is a very effective technology to emulate virtual operating systems. It offers huge possibilities for using and testing operating systems, and gives a very nice performance.

Of course, itโ€™s free and open source and available in all major Linux distributionsโ€™ repositories, which makes it one of the best emulating and virtualization software on the Linux desktop.

Bobby Borisov

Bobby Borisov

Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.

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