[Qemu-devel] [ANNOUNCE] QEMU 1.0 release

[Anthony Liguori]

Hi,

On behalf of the QEMU Team, I'd like to announce the availability of
QEMU 1.0!

Over 8 years ago, Fabrice Bellard started QEMU as a small tool to run x86 Linux 
binaries on non-x86 Linux platforms.  QEMU has since evolved into a cross 
architecture full system simulator capable of simulating 14 different target 
architectures across a wide variety of host platforms.  QEMU can simulate over 
400 different hardware devices in dozens of different boards.

QEMU also forms the heart of multiple hardware virtualization platforms 
including Xen and KVM.

Over those 8 years, we have seen almost 20,000 changesets from close to 400 
unique authors.  I'd like to personally thank everyone who has contributed to 
making this release and all of our previous releases a success!

In this release, we have seen many improvements.  For the a full summary of 
changes, see the ChangeLog below.  You can download 1.0 from qemu.org at:

http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-1.0.tar.gz

ChangeLog:

== General ==
* i386-softmmu is no longer named ''qemu'' but instead referred to as 
''qemu-system-i386'' for better consistency with other targets.  A new tool is 
likely to be introduced that uses the ''qemu'' name so distributions are advised 
to not undo this change.
* QEMU now uses a separate thread for VCPU execution.  This merges the biggest 
difference between the qemu-kvm tree and upstream QEMU.
* A new memory dispatch API has been added internally.  A new monitor command 
"info mtree" can show the hierarchy of memory regions in the guest.
* QEMU now has a build dependency on glib and makes extensive use of glib.
* QEMU now can run on more hosts. Hosts without a native code generator can use 
the TCG interpreter (TCI). See [[Features/TCI]] for more information.

== Block devices (disks) ==
* QEMU now supports I/O latency accounting in the monitor command "info 
blockstats".
* Errors are now tracked per device and are shown by the monitor command "info 
block".
* All image formats now support asynchronous operation.  IDE and SCSI emulation 
will use this feature, while other devices (notably floppy and SD) will not.

=== IDE/ATAPI ===
* A large number of bugs were fixed regarding CD media change and tray locking.

=== SCSI ===
* Memory management errors could crash QEMU when scsi-disk encountered I/O 
errors.  Many instances of this problem were fixed.
* The accuracy of error handling for SCSI emulation has been greatly improved.
* SCSI devices can now be addressed by channel, target (id) and LUN.  Not all 
emulated HBAs will support this feature (in particular, the LSI controller will 
not).
* Block device pass through is now supported through a new scsi-block device. 
The scsi-block device works with block devices (like /dev/sda or /dev/sr0) 
rather than /dev/sgN devices, and is more efficient because it does not consume 
arbitrary amounts of memory when the guest does large data transfers.
* SCSI CD-ROMs now report media changed events.
* SCSI CD-ROMs now support DVD images.
* Bugfixes for IDE media change also apply to SCSI.
* SCSI devices now report a unit attention condition when the system is started 
or reset.  This may cause problems with old firmware versions.

=== VDI ===
* Now supports discarded blocks in dynamically-sized images.

== User-mode networking (SLIRP) ==
* SLIRP can process ARP replies and gratuitous ARP requests from the guest.

== ARM ==
* QEMU now supports the new Cortex-A15 instructions in linux-user mode (via 
"-cpu any"): VFPv4 fused multiply-accumulate (VFMA, VFMS, VFNMA, VFNMS) and also 
integer division (UDIV, SDIV).
* The vexpress-a9, versatileab, versatilepb and realview-* boards now have audio 
support.
* QEMU is known not to work on ARM hosts in this release. (ARM target emulation 
is fine.)

=== pSeries ===
* sPAPR VIO devices can now be created with -device.

== Xtensa ==
* QEMU now supports DC232b and FSF xtensa CPU cores.
* QEMU now supports sim (similar to Tensilica ISS) and LX60/LX110/LX200 
machines.

== Migration ==
* QEMU now supports live migration using image files like QCOW2 on shared 
storage

Regards,

Anthony Liguori