QEMU, the well-known processor emulator, has just arrived at version 5.0 with the intention of remaining one of the pillars of virtualization on GNU/Linux.
QEMU 5.0 brings a lot of changes and the discontinuation of some components, such as support for 32-bit ARM hosts, which has been marked as obsolete by project managers. At the system emulation level, we find the elimination without replacement of the Bluetooth support because it has been neglected for years, but as an alternative, you can use a Bluetooth USB connected to the guest system through the host. The virtio-blk SCSI gateway feature has also been marked as outdated and it is recommended to use virtio-scsi instead.
However, not only with deletions and obsolete states, we find ourselves in QEMU 5. The latest version of the processor emulator has important novelties such as the support of more features of the ARMv8 architecture, among which are RCPC, PMU, CCIDX, RCPC, and TTCNP; support for Cortex-M7 processors; VirtIO-FS support to improve file and folder sharing between hosts and guests; in addition to having become Dbus-VMstate in the new backend to allow external processes to migrate their data together with QEMU.
QEMU is capable of emulating a large number of architectures, so in each one, we find different changes. For example, on PowerPC pseries type machines, a "reconfiguration restart is no longer required for a guest who selects the XIVE interrupt handler when 'ic-mode = dual'". Following PowerPC, guest systems consume "fewer host resources when running a KVM guest with XIVE (with a sufficiently recent host kernel). This allows more concurrent guests to run with accelerated KVM XIVE. ” For its part, in RISC-V"Virt and sifive_u boards now have syscon device tree nodes, allowing generic syscon drivers in Linux to control power on and restart", and added "experimental support for version 0.5 of the draft extension of the hypervisor ”. For ARM virtualization virtio-iommu has been added.
Although it is a component closely tied to virtualization solutions for GNU/Linux, QEMU also offers host-level support for macOS and Windows. It can be used independently or together with Xen or KVM. Some of its components have been integrated into VirtualBox, possibly the leading virtualization solution in home environments thanks to its ease of use. Regarding its combination with KVM, you can use GNOME Boxes or the rough virt-manager interface.
Those interested in QEMU 5 can consult the changelog on the project wiki and download it from the corresponding section on the official website.
0 Comments