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.