QEMU 4.2 Released With Many Improvements For Linux Virtualization
There are many changes to find with QEMU 4.2 to end out 2019 but some of the highlights for this feature update to this leading open-source emulator for hardware virtualization include:
- Support for Intel AVX-512 BFloat16 (BF16) extensions.
- The latest updates of all the CPU models now have TSX (Transactional Synchronization Extensions) extensions disabled by default. This is due to the recent TSX Async Abort vulnerability / Zombieload Variant Two.
- Better performance for Tiny Code Generator (TCG) emulation of ARM cores.
- Another QEMU 4.2 performance improvement can come with recent Gcrypt and Nettle libraries where QEMU can now use the library's own XTS cipher mode and that can result in a big performance boost for AES-XTS encryption particularly if using LUKS disk encryption when running under QEMU.
- The LUKS block driver now supports falloc/full pre-allocation.
- Support for QEMU on ARM to run with more than 256 CPUs.
- ASpeed AST2600 model support.
- Arm SVE (Scalable Vector Extensions) is now supported with KVM guests on capable ARM SoCs and supported kernels.
- The Apple macOS Hypervisor Framework (HVF) support is now considered stable.
More details on QEMU 4.2 via QEMU.org.
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