RISC-V

QEMU has bad 32-bit news and good RISC-V news

QEMU 11.0 is also enabling the emulation of more Arm CPU features.

Jordan Gloor

Jordan Gloor

— 1 min read
The QEMU logo over a blue patterned background of Tux penguins and sun rays.

The developers of QEMU debuted on Tuesday version 11.0 of its machine emulator and virtualization software. It brings a lot of work on Arm and RISC-V host support while also dropping support for aging host devices.

What's new

  • Several RISC-V extensions: QEMU machines can now take advantage of the following extensions on RISC-V devices:
    • Zilsd
    • Zclsd
    • ZALASR
    • Smpmpmt
  • Additional CPU emulation on Arm: The following architectural features can now be emulated on Arm hosts:
    • FEAT_ASID2
    • FEAT_E2H0

What's getting better

  • Memory management on Arm: The SMMUv3 IOMMU can now be accelerated with the -device arm-smmuv3,accel=on flag.

What's going away

  • 32-bit support: You won't be able to run QEMU 11.0 and later on 32-bit hosts. According to the release notes, maintaining support was "a substantial burden for the QEMU project."
  • Various emulators: Several emulation machines will no longer work on QEMU. They include
    • ast2700a0-evb (QEMU recommends ast2700a1-evb instead)
    • pc-i440fx-2.6
    • pc-q35-2.6
    • pc-i440fx-2.7
    • pc-q35-2.7

Diving in

The fineprint: I barely scratched the surface of updates for QEMU 11.0. Read the full changelog, which has a ton more technical details, to make sure I didn't miss anything important to you.

Get it now: Go to the official QEMU download page for distro-specific instructions on installing it. If you've already installed on a rolling-release distro, you should see QEMU 11.0 in your updates any day now.

Zooming out

Why this update matters: QEMU is a quintessential virtualization tool for Linux devices. The fact it's dropping 32-bit device support follows the majority of popular Linux distros having dropped it as well over the past few years.

My take: I'm about to set up a brand new StarFive 2 RISC-V board. I'm glad to hear I can expect better virtualization capabilities.

Source: Thanks to Linuxiac for first bringing it to my attention.

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