QEMU 2.3 Approaches Release & Is Bringing Many Improvements

QEMU 2.3 is nearing its release and on Tuesday the first release candidate (2.3.0-rc0) was released in encouraging testing for this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack.

QEMU 2.3 brings many changes including support for emulating Netduino 2 ARM boards, the KVM virt board supports 32-bit guests on 64-bit hosts, support for the MIPS 5KEc/5KEf MIPS64r2 and M14K/M14Kc MIPS32r2 processors, PCI bus support on s390 with KVM, more complete TriCore emulation, a new x86 Ivy Bridge CPU model, KVM now supports running under Valgrind, improved TPM support, the QEMU GUI now uses frame-buffer data directly from the guest RAM, new monitor commands, support for SD cards on PCI systems, and many other changes.

Those wishing to find out more about the extensive changes/features coming for QEMU 2.3 can see the change-log Wiki page. QEMU 2.3-rc0 details can be found via the release announcement.

Three more release candidates are planned before officially releasing QEMU 2.3, which is currently scheduled to happen on 14 April.