There are plenty of changes across the board with QEMU 5.1 while some of the highlights standing out include:
- Support for live migration on AMD EPYC systems with nested virtualization.
- Persistent Memory Region (PMR) support from the NVMe 1.4 specification.
- Support for passing secrets to QEMU via the Linux keyring.
- Support for the ARMv8.5 memory tagging feature and ARMv8.2 TTS2UXN, Raspberry Pi boards now support the USB controller, and other Arm improvements.
- Support for two Loongson 3A CPUs while improving the MIPS performance in general with QEMU 5.1.
- The ability to select POWER10 as a machine type on the IBM PowerPC front. SCV and RFSCV instructions are also supported on the POWER front with this update.
- Support for the AVR CPU architecture and some boards like select Arduino devices.
- A wide variety of RISC-V improvements including support for the SiFive E34, Ibex CPU, HiFive1 Rev B, OpenTitan, and a variety of RISC-V architectural additions.
- Support for protected virtualization / secure extension on IBM s390- with a z16 or Linux One III and using Linux 5.7+ with KVM.
- Improved HVF acceleration support on Apple macOS.
- Various crypto improvements.
- Support for Zstd compression for QCOW2 images when using compress_type=zstd as a creation option.
More details on QEMU 5.1 that was released overnight via QEMU.org .