QEMU 2.6 Is Due In Just Over One Week With Many New Features

QEMU 2.6-RC3 was released this week and QEMU 2.6.0 should be officially released at the beginning of May. Here's a look at some of the new features coming to this important piece of the Linux open-source virtualization stack.

Some of the highlights for QEMU 2.6 include:

- In the ARM space there's partial Raspberry Pi 2 emulation support via the "raspi2" machine type. It can boot older versions of Windows and Raspbian but the port is incomplete.

- QEMU has MIPS R6 Virtual Processors support.

- QEMU's TCG Tiny Code Generator supports a number of more x86 instruction set extensions / features.

- QEMU's VFIO code has AMD XGBE platform pass-through support.

- VirtIO performance improvements via optimized vring accesses.

- The QEMU GUI with SDL2 and SPICE now support OpenGL and VirGL.

- A new mechanism for securely passing secret credientials to QEMU.

- Block device throttling now supports setting a burst length.

Those are the features that caught my attention and interested me the most as new to QEMU 2.6. You can find the very lengthy complete change-log for the forthcoming QEMU 2.6 via this Wiki page. QEMU 2.6 is scheduled to have an RC4 release next week followed by the official v2.6.0 tagging on 3 May.