QEMU 8.2 Released With New VirtIO-Sound & VirtIO-GPU "Rutabaga" Devices

QEMU 8.2 has been released as the newest update for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role within the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

QEMU 8.2 brings forth many new features and improvements for closing out 2023. Some of the key QEMU 8.2 highlights include:

- QEMU 8.2 adds a new "virtio-sound" device that implements capture and playback from inside a guest using the configured audio backend of the host machine.

- A new VirtIO-GPU "Rutabaga" device that allows various abstractions of GPU and display virtualization. This VirtIO-GPU Rutabaga comes from the Android/CrosVM graphics stack and is intended for use with the Android Emulator on QEMU.

- For Microsoft Hyper-V users is now a new "hv-balloon" device for the Hyper-V Dynamic Memory protocol. QEMU documentation describes this as "virtio-balloon on steroids for Windows guests."

- Support for UFS emulation via new ufs and ufs-lu devices.

- P2P support for VFIO migration.

- Prep changes for the new IOMMUFD back-end.

- As usual the RISC-V software development continues to be quite active. QEMU 8.2 is supporting a number of new RISC-V ISA extensions, support for virtual IRQs and IRQ filtering, and RISC-V vector crypto v1.0 support.

- QEMU's 68k Macintosh Quadra 800 emulation can now boot MacOS 7.1, A/UX 3.0.1, Linux, and NetBSD 9.3.

- New Arm CPU types of Cortex-A710 and Neoverse-N2. There is also support for newer ARM architecture extensions that can now be emulated.

- QEMU on LoongArch now supports the LASX and PRELDX instructions. Plus support for 4K page sizes and other ongoing LoongArch enablement work.

- With Intel having dropped support for HAX(M) as the Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager, HAX is no longer supported by QEMU. It was at the start of this year intel discontinued HAXM development.

Downloads and more details on the QEMU 8.2 feature release via wiki.qemu.org.