QEMU 7.1 Being Prepared With LoongArch Support, More RISC-V Features

QEMU 7.1 is working its way toward release as the next major version of this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source virtualization stack.

QEMU 7.1-rc0 has been released as the initial step towards what will be the stable release in a matter of weeks. QEMU 7.1-rc0 today marks the hard feature freeze while now weekly release candidates will continue until QEMU 7.1.0 stable is ready. The plan is for QEMU 7.1 stable to be out before the end of August.

QEMU 7.1 brings LoongArch support, a lot of new RISC-V extensions, and a variety of other enhancements. Some of the QEMU 7.1 highlights include:

- Support for emulating many more Arm CPU instruction set features. On the Arm front there is also emulated support for the Cortex-A76 and Neoverse-N1 targets.

- Initial support for the LoongArch 64-bit CPU architecture initially for the Loongson 3A5000 series SoCs.

- Support for the privileged spec version 1.12 for RISC-V, improved PMU implementation, support for the Zmmul extension, and a variety of other RISC-V architecture improvements and other new extensions now enabled.

- QEMU 7.1 on x86 now adds support for architectural LBRs on KVM VMs.

- For QEMU migration there is now support for zero-copy-send on Linux to reduce CPU usage on the source host.

- Improved Solaris support in the QEMU guest agent code.

More details on the QEMU.org Wiki surrounding next month's QEMU 7.1 planned release.