QEMU 6.0 Released With AMD SEV-ES Encrypted Guest Support, Experimental Multi-Process

QEMU 6.0 is out today as the newest feature release for this processor/machine emulator and virtualizer that serves as an important part of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

QEMU 6.0 brings with it many new features including the likes of experimental multi-process device emulation support, AMD SEV-ES encrypted guest support, new processor.machine support, and other virtualization improvements.

- QEMU can now be built with link-time optimizations (LTO) and also supports LLVM Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) too.

- Support for running AMD SEV-ES encrypted guests is now (finally) in place.

- New experimental options for supporting out-of-process device emulation. This work-in-progress, experimental feature is for multi-process QEMU. The goal with the multi-process QEMU is to run emulated devices in separate processes to increase overall security rather than having one large monolithic QEMU process. The multi-process QEMU work is led by Oracle engineers but for QEMU 6.0 is still in its early stage with just supporting an LSI SCSI controller emulated device so far adapted.

- Security fixes for QEMU's VirtIO-FS support.

- The QEMU GUI with VNC now supports cursors with alpha channels. The VNC code also now supports extended desktop resize. The VirtIO-VGA mode with QEMU 6.0 in turn should have the guest display adapt to the VNC client window on resize.

- An experimental background RAM snapshot feature.

- A variety of QEMU RISC-V improvements, including initial work for supporting 32-bit CPUs on 64-bit software builds, initial RISC-V system documentation, and various features wired up.

- QEMU now supports emulating the ARMv8.1-M architecture and the Cortex M55 CPU. Various ARMv8 extensions like SEL2, TTST, DIT, and MemTag are now supported too for emulation.

- The emulated NVMe controller now supports NVMe 1.4 and has experimental support for zoned namespaces, NVM Subsystems, and Metadata and End-To-End Data Protection. The emulated NVMe controller also supports new commands and other new features.

- The Xen path adds a new guest loader for testing Xen-like hypervisors in booting directly to the kernel without any firmware/bootloader.

- Support for QEMU to emulate Qualcomm Hexagon DSP units.

- Loongson-3 virt machine added.

- The new and more powerful m68k machine.

- Security fixes to VirtIOFS and other components.

- The QEMU GUI VNC code adds support for cursors with alpha channels.

More details and downloads for QEMU 6.0 can be found via QEMU.org.