* New features are not tested yet, for example SPICE protocol support.
* I have tested on NetBSD/i386 5.99.54 and DragonFly/i386 2.10.1 as host,
NetBSD/{amd64, i386, sparc} as guest.
Changelog:
0.14.1
virtio-blk: fail unaligned requests
qed: Fix consistency check on 32-bit hosts
exit if -drive specified is invalid instead of ignoring the "wrong" -drive
vhost: fix dirty page handling
Do not delete BlockDriverState when deleting the drive
vnc: tight: Fix crash after 2GB of output
lan9118: Ignore write to MAC_VLAN1 register
Don't allow multiwrites against a block device without lsi53c895a: add support for ABORT messages
virtio-pci: fix bus master work around on load
fix applesmc REV key
rbd: don't link with -lcrypto
net: Add the missing option declaration of "vhostforce"
lsi53c895a: Update dnad when skipping MSGOUT bytes
Revert "prep: Disable second IDE channel, as long as ISA IDE emulation doesn't support same irq for both channels"
isa-bus: Remove bogus IRQ sharing check
virtio-net: Fix lduw_p() pointer argument of wrong size
hw/sd.c: Add missing state change for SD_STATUS, SEND_NUM_WR_BLOCKS
vnc: Fix fatal crash with vnc reverse mode
qemu-char: Check for missing backend name
0.14.0
Targets
ARM
Most of the changes are related to bug fixes and improvements to match what the real hardware does. For now there is no new board or CPU.
MIPS
Host CPU consumption for idle guests
Timer fixes
FPU improvements
SH4
Various bug fixes and improvements including
SM501 2D engine copyrect support, needed to boot recent kernels
MMU mmaped TLB access, needed to boot recent kernels
Floating point exceptions and correct NaN support.
PPC
Fix running recent PPC64 kernels
New maintainer: Alexander Graf
Improve interrupt injection with KVM
Enable PV enabled guests for speedup with KVM
Floating point fixes
Add a ppc-440x5 Xilinx model
Add a virtex5 ml507 refdesign board for ppc-440x5
BookE MMU emulation improvements
s390x
No news, business as usual.
SPARC
Fix div(cc) and sdiv(cc) instruction emulation, fixes Xorg crash in the guest
Hosts
ARM
Fix random crashes
Fix 64-bit big-endian targets support
MIPS
Fix random crashes
IA64
Fix random crashes for 32-bit targets
Devices
IDE / AHCI
Added emulation layer for an ICH-9 AHCI controller (not yet stable). Tested with Linux, OpenBSD, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The AHCI emulation supports NCQ, so multiple read or write requests can be outstanding at the same time.
to use it, use the following command line snippet: -drive id=disk,file=<your image goes here>,if=none -device ahci,id=ahci -device ide-drive,drive=disk,bus=ahci.0
SCSI
Various bug fixes, no new features.
USB
Added USB support for remote wakeup, allowing the guest to suspend the USB bus when idle, which in turn reduces the CPU overhead of an idle machine.
The USB subsystem also got a bunch of patches to prepare it for USB 2.0 support.
virtio
virtio-pci can use ioeventfd for virtqueue notify. On systems that support KVM, the ioeventfd mechanism can be used to make virtqueue notify a lightweight exit by deferring hardware emulation to the iothread and allowing the VM to continue execution. This model is similar to how vhost receives virtqueue notifies. The result of this change is improved performance for userspace virtio devices. Virtio-blk throughput increases especially for multithreaded scenarios and virtio-net transmit throughput increases substantially. Read the commit message for more details.
Various fixes and stabilization for live-migration:
Various virtio-net improvements:
Make tx_timer timeout configurable
Limit number of packets sent per TX flush
Introduce a new bottom half packet TX
Fix cross-endianness support
PCI/PCI Express
Improved PCI Express support and functionalities with the implementation of:
flr (Function Level Reset)
aer (Advanced Error Reporting) and other improvements
A new monitor command to inject errors into the PCI bus: pcie_aer_inject_error
Implementation of Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI/MSI-X) support
Separation of the PCI bridge code from the main PCI code.
Sound
New Intel HD Audio support, adding three new devices:
intel-hda: Intel HD Audio Controller, the PCI device.
hda-duplex: HDA Codec. Attaches to the HDA bus. Supports 16bit stereo, rates 16k -> 96k, playback, recording and volume control (with CONFIG_MIXEMU=y).
hda-output: HDA Codec without recording support. Subset of the hda-duplex codec. Use this if you don't want your guests access your mic.
Usage: add '-device intel-hda -device hda-duplex' to your command line.
Tested guests:
Linux works.
Win7 works.
DOS (mpxplay) works.
WinXP doesn't work.
Real Time Clock
Fix binary/BCD mode switch
Video
Fix cirrus VGA crash with some guests
Fix curses big endian support
Block Drivers
qcow2
Added a writeback metadata cache. This improves performance of scenarios with lots of cluster allocations noticably (e.g. installation or after taking a snapshot), in some benchmarks by a factor of ten or more. Use cache=none or cache=writeback to take advantage from this change.
Copy snapshots out of QCOW2 disk, eg: qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O qcow2 -s snapshot_name src_img bck_img
Zero-copy read and write operations
Other fixes and code cleanups:
qcow2: Invalidate cache after failed read
block: Allow bdrv_flush to return errors
qcow2: Simplify image creation
qcow2: Fixes unaligned access on IA64
qed
Introduction of the QEMU Enhanced Disk (qed) image format. It is a disk image format that forgoes features found in qcow2 in favor of better levels of performance and data integrity. Due to its simpler on-disk layout, it is possible to safely perform metadata updates more efficiently.
More information about qed: http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/QED
Initial thread discussion: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-09/msg00310.html
ceph/rbd
Introduction of the new ceph/rbd block driver. RBD is an block driver for the distributed file system Ceph.
More information about ceph: http://ceph.newdream.net/
nbd
Improve qemu-nbd performance by 4400 %. This patch combines the reply header and payload send operation.
Introduce NBD named exports.
Spice
New support for the SPICE protocol. The project main focus is to provide high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines. More information about SPICE can be found at the project's web site: http://spice-space.org/
New qxl device. qxl is a paravirtual graphics card. The qxl device is the bridge between the guest and the spice server (aka libspice-server). The spice server will send the rendering commands to the spice client, which will actually render them. The spice server is also able to render locally, which is done in case the guest wants read something from video memory. Local rendering is also used to support display over vnc and sdl. qxl is activated using -vga qxl. qxl supports multihead, additional cards can be added via '-device qxl.
Relevant commits:
spice: core bits
spice: add keyboard
spice: add mouse
spice: simple display
spice: add tablet support
spice: tls support
spice: make compression configurable.
spice: add config options for channel security.
spice: add config options for the listening address
spice: add misc config options
spice: add audio
spice: add qxl device
spice: connection events.
QMP / monitor
TODO: QMP is now stable, except for error reporting?
The work to facilitate the management of QEMU instances has been improved. QMP has received various fixes. Now it is possible to call a traditional monitor command through QMP, in case your application depends on the output or the command is not yet ported to QMP.
New commands:
query-spice / info spice
human-monitor-command
set_password
drive_del
block_resize command, allowing resizing of block devices while qemu is running. For virtio-blk the size is updated automatically when this command is issued on the host. IDE is not supported. For SCSI devices the new size can be updated in Linux guests by doing the following shell command:
echo > /sys/class/scsi_device/0:0:0:0/device/rescan
Tracing
Introduction of platform-independent tracing, more information about it: http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/Tracing
Documentation and tutorial: http://git.qemu.org/qemu.git/plain/docs/tracing.txt
Some relevant commits:
Add trace-events file for declaring trace events
Add a DTrace tracing backend targetted for SystemTAP compatibility
Add LTTng Userspace Tracer backend
Add simple built-in tracing backend
Add stderr trace-event backend:
Support for dynamically enabling/disabling trace events
Specify trace file name
Add trace-file command to open/close/flush trace file
Other stuff
Extend -option-rom command to have additional parameter bootindex
Little endian / big endian MMIO framework. Until now, most devices had special hacks to allow them to work on big and little endian systems (ppc / x86). With that framework, they should mostly work with both and not require and device specific hacks anymore.
1b87b00638