QEMU version 4.2.0 released 13 Dec 2019

We would like to announce the availability of the QEMU 4.2.0 release. This release contains 2200+ commits from 198 authors.

You can grab the tarball from our download page. The full list of changes are available in the Wiki.

Highlights include:

TCG plugin support for passive monitoring of instructions and memory accesses

block: NBD block driver now supports more efficient handling of copy-on-read requests

block: NBD server optimizations for copying of sparse images, and general fixes/improvements for NBD server/client implementations

block/crypto: improved performance for AES-XTS encryption for LUKS disk encryption

vfio-pci support for “failover_pair_id” property for easier migration of VFIO devices

virtio-mmio now supports virtio-compatible v2 personality and virtio 1.1 support for packed virtqueues

68k: new “next-cube” machine for emulating a classic NeXTcube

68k: new “q800” machine for emulating Macintosh Quadro 800

ARM: new “ast2600-evb” machine for emulating Aspeed AST2600 SoC

ARM: semihosting v2.0 support with STDOUT_STDERR/EXIT_EXTENDED extentions

ARM: KVM support for more than 256 CPUs

ARM: “virt” machine now supports memory hotplugging

ARM: improved TCG emulation performance

ARM: KVM support for SVE SIMD instructions on SVE-capable hardware

PowerPC: emulation support for mffsce, mffscrn, and mffscrni POWER9 instructions

PowerPC: “powernv” machine now supports Homer and OCC SRAM system devices

RISC-V: “-initrd” argument now supported

RISC-V: debugger can now see all architectural state

s390: emulation support for IEP (Instruction Execution Protection)

SPARC: “sun4u” IOMMU now supports “invert endianness” bit

x86: VMX features can be enabled/disabled via “-cpu” flags

x86: new “microvm” machine that uses virtio-mmio instead of PCI for use as baseline for performance optimizations

x86: emulation support for AVX512 BFloat16 extensions

x86: new CPU models for Denverton (server-class Atom-based SoC), Snowridge, and Dhyana

x86: macOS Hypervisor.framework support (“-accel hvf”) now considered stable

xtensa: new “virt” machine type

xtensa: call0 ABI support for user-mode emulation

and lots more…

Thank you to everyone involved!