The release of project QEMU 11.0.0 has been announced. As an emulator, QEMU allows you to run programs built for one hardware platform on a system with a completely different architecture, for example, executing an application for ARM on an x86-compatible PC. In virtualization mode, the performance of code execution in an isolated environment is close to that of a hardware system due to direct execution of instructions on the CPU and involvement of the Xen hypervisor or the KVM module in Linux, or the NVMM module in NetBSD.
The project was initially created by Fabrice Bellard to enable the execution of Linux executables built for x86 on architectures other than x86. Over the years of development, support for full emulation of 14 hardware architectures has been added, and the number of emulated hardware devices has exceeded 400. In preparing version 11.0.0, more than 2500 changes have been made by 237 developers.
Key improvements added in QEMU 11.0:
- Support for 32-bit host systems has been removed, which was deprecated in April last year in QEMU 10.0. In the December release 10.2, support for mips32 and ppc32 platforms was discontinued in the TCG (Tiny Code Generator), and in the QEMU 11.0 release, the remaining i386, arm, ppc, and riscv32 platforms have been removed, along with a cleanup of the codebase and build system from components for working on 32-bit hosts.
- A virtualization accelerator "nitro" ("-accel nitro") and a new type of emulated system "nitro" have been implemented, allowing QEMU to run isolated enclaves based on AWS Nitro Enclave confidential computing technology, for example, for local testing of Nitro Enclave environments in QEMU. In AWS EC2, Nitro Enclave technology allows running nested isolated enclaves within a virtual machine to work with confidential data, allocating part of its resources to them.
- Improved support for virtualization accelerators MSHV (Microsoft Hypervisor) and WHPX (Microsoft Windows Hypervisor Platform Extensions).
- When using the KVM hypervisor ("-accel kvm"), support for Intel CET (Control-flow Enforcement Technology) virtualization extension has been provided for application in virtual machines protection against exploits that use return-oriented programming (ROP) techniques. Support for confidential reboots has also been added. of virtual machines, using AMD SEV-SNP (Secure Encrypted Virtualization — Secure Nested Paging) and Intel TDX (Trust Domain Extensions) for memory encryption.
- The VirtIO-GPU device, which enables virtual GPU functionality, now allows different screen resolutions for various output devices.
- Support for DRM (Direct Rendering Manager native context) has been added in VirtIO-GPU, allowing improved performance with the virtual GPU from the guest system through direct command transmission to the real host GPU. DRM context support is enabled when using the new virtio-gpu-gl device with the option 'drm_native_context=on'. Unlike Virgl and Venus contexts, which operate at the OpenGL and Vulkan API levels, the DRM context is implemented at the Linux kernel's UAPI level.
- Support for using C++ for plugin development for the TCG (Tiny Code Generator) has been added.
- Support for building the NFS block driver with the libnfs 6 library has been added.
- The curl block driver has added a 'force-range' option to enforce the use of the HTTP 'Range' header when downloading images without first verifying support with a separate HEAD request.
- In the FUSE block driver, the handling of export operations in synchronous mode, which caused virtual machine launches to block until other FUSE requests were processed, has been disabled. Support for multiple I/O threads (iothread) during export operations in FUSE has been introduced.
- Support for Intel Diamond Rapids ('Xeon 7') CPU has been added to the x86 architecture emulator.
- Support for CPU extensions FEAT_ASID2 and FEAT_E2H0 has been added to the ARM architecture emulator. The TCG code generator now includes emulation of SME (Scalable Matrix Extension) extensions.
- The HPPA architecture emulator has added support for emulating 64-bit CPUs with 40- and 44-bit address spaces. Using SeaBIOS-hppa 24, the initialization of the Astro PCI controller has been ensured, allowing the use of PCI graphics cards on 64-bit systems.
- The LoongArch architecture emulator has introduced PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) migration support when using the KVM hypervisor. The TCG code generator now implements emulation of LA v1.1, sc.q, and llacq/screl extensions, as well as FRECIP and DRECIP instructions for calculating inverse values.
- Support for snapshots has been added to the PowerPC architecture emulator.
- The RISC-V architecture emulator has implemented support for the MIPS P8700 CPU and the Zilsd, Zclsd, ZALASR, and Smpmpmt instruction set extensions.
- The s390 architecture emulator now supports booting from virtio-blk-pci devices and has implemented emulation of the "DIVIDE TO INTEGER" instruction.
- A correction has been accepted that reduces delays during fdmon (file descriptor monitoring) operation in the "aio=io_uring" mode by 50-80 times while the system is in an idle state.
Source: opennet.ru
