QEMU 6.1 Is On The Way For The Open-Source Linux Virtualization Stack

Released on Tuesday was QEMU 6.1.0-rc0 as the first test release working towards QEMU 6.1's stable debut before the end of August.

QEMU 6.1 is another sizable feature release building off QEMU 6.0 that released at the end of April. QEMU remains an important piece of the Linux open-source virtualization stack and is also used on other platforms.

With QEMU 6.1.0-rc0, QEMU 6.1 is now under a hard feature freeze and will see weekly release candidates until ready to ship. The current plan is that QEMU 6.1.0 will be ready by mid-to-late August. Among the changes coming with QEMU 6.1 are:

- Support on PowerPC for greatly increased maximum CPU count support that users are likely to hit other system limits before being restricted by QEMU.

- RISC-V on QEMU has updates around OpenTitan platform support, support for VirtIO VGA, and a variety of other architecture improvements.

- More work on POWER10 support within the Tiny Code Generator (TCG).

- Emulation support of more Arm CPU features, including SVE2 and BFloat16 among others.

- QEMU 6.1 on x86 adds new CPU model versions with XSAVES enabled, a new machine option to allow rate limiting bus locks by guests, and other changes.

- QEMU's virtio-mem now works with VFIO.

- Dropping of old CPU targets including Moxie, lm32, and unicore32.

More details via the rc0 announcement and QEMU Wiki for the tentative change-log.