The release of QEMU 9.1 has been announced. As an emulator, QEMU allows you to run a program built for one hardware platform on a system with a completely different architecture, such as executing an ARM application on an x86-compatible PC. In virtualization mode, the performance of code execution in an isolated environment is close to that of a physical system due to the direct execution of instructions on the CPU and the involvement of the Xen hypervisor or the KVM module in Linux, or the NVMM module in NetBSD.
Initially, the project was created by Fabrice Bellard to enable the execution of Linux executable files compiled for the x86 platform on architectures different from x86. Over the years of development, support for full emulation for 14 hardware architectures has been added, and the number of emulated hardware devices has exceeded 400. More than 2800 changes from 263 developers were made in preparing version 9.1.
Key improvements added in QEMU 9.1:
- In the guest system migration toolkit, support for accelerating data compression operations has been implemented using IAA (Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator) or UADK (User Space Accelerator Development Kit) technology. Support for recovery after migration failures in postcopy mode has been enhanced.
- In the virtio mechanism used to facilitate interaction between guest systems and the host system, support for the VIRTIO_F_NOTIFICATION_DATA function has been added, allowing drivers on the guest systems to transmit additional data along with sent notifications. This function can be used, for example, to send debugging information or to optimize performance.
- In the guest agent for Linux systems, the guest-network-get-route command has been added, and for Windows systems, guest-ssh-* commands have been introduced. The command line interface has been expanded to enhance the configuration options for the 'allowed' and 'blocked' commands.
- In the ARM architecture emulator, support for the EAT_NMI, FEAT_CSV2_3, FEAT_ETS2, FEAT_Spec_FPACC, FEAT_WFxT, FEAT_Debugv8p8 processor extensions has been added. For SMMUv3 (System Memory Management Unit) memory management unit emulation, support for nested and two-level memory pages has been implemented. For Xilinx Zynq boards, support has been added for emulating multiprocessor configurations, the DM163 display controller, and the cache controller.
- The LoongArch architecture emulator now supports direct loading of kernel images in ELF format and can run up to 256 CPUs using the extioi extension. Debugging capabilities have been improved.
- The RISC-V architecture emulator has added support for processor extensions Zve32x, Zve64x, Zimop, Zcmop, Zama16b, Zabha, Zawrs, and Smcntrpmf, as well as version 1.13 of the privileged instruction set architecture specification. Debugging capabilities have been improved.
- Support for processor extensions FMAF, IMA, VIS3, and VIS4 has been added to the SPARC architecture emulator.
- The x86 architecture emulator for the hypervisor has enabled support for the AVX10 instruction set, including specific versions AVX10 — avx10-128, avx10-256, and avx10-512. KVM The ability to run guest systems using AMD SEV-SNP (Secure Nested Paging) processor extension, which ensures secure handling of nested memory page tables, has been implemented. CPU emulation has been added for Icelake-Server-v7, SapphireRapids-v3, and SierraForest microarchitectures.
- A vulnerability (CVE-2024-7409) has been fixed in server network block devices (NBD), allowing for the possibility of a crash of QEMU during the nbd-server-stop operation due to manipulations in the guest system, even if the client does not have TLS keys to connect to the NBD server.
Source: opennet.ru
