QEMU 7.0 Is Coming With Intel AMX Support, Many RISC-V Improvements

QEMU 7.0 is working its way towards release as an important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.0 brings with it many notable new features and changes for this open-source processor emulator.

Yesterday marked the hard feature freeze and QEMU 7.0-rc0 milestone. Weekly release candidates will now continue until the official QEMU 7.0 release is ready. QEMU 7.0 is tentatively scheduled to be out around the middle of April depending upon exactly how many release candidates are deemed necessary.

QEMU 7.0 notably adds support for Intel AMX which is good with the Linux KVM support for Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions also now squared away for mainline. There also continues to be a lot of work on the RISC-V architecture side and a wide assortment of other changes.

Some of the QEMU 7.0 highlights include:

- Many Arm architecture improvements including the new mori-bmc board model, support for emulating additional features, and virt board improvements.

- OpenRISC now supports up to four cores compared to two cores previously being the limit for their simulator machine. OpenRISC code can also now automatically generate the DeviceTree and pass it to the kernel.

- QEMU 7.0 drops old PowerPC 401 / 403 / 601 / 602 CPU support.

- QEMU's Tiny Code Generator (TCG) has dropped support for ARMv4 and ARMv5 hosts.

- QEMU on RISC-V now supports the ratified Vector 1.0 extension along with other new extensions like Zve64f, Zve32f, and others.

- RISC-V KVM support that recently went upstream in the mainline Linux kernel is now supported by QEMU.

- QEMU for RISC-V also saw other improvements like enabling the hypervisor extension by default and experimental support for 128-bit CPUs.

- QEMU 7.0 adds support for Intel AMX.

- The 9pfs code now supports macOS hosts.

- The HPPA target can now support up to 16 vCPUs.

- QEMU 7.0 adds a "-display dbus" option for exporting the display for external processes with a gtk4-rs Rust-based GTK4 viewer in the works for a future version of GNOME Boxes and virt-viewer.

- More flexible fleecing backup support.

- Support for Microsoft Windows 11 within the "guest-get-osinfo" command.

More details on the changes to find with QEMU 7.0 can be found over on the QEMU.org Wiki.