QEMU Version 6.1.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

QEMU Version 6.1.0 Released

qemu.org

107 pointsmarcodiego16 comments

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https://www.qemu.org/

ChangeLog/6.1

https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/6.1

QEMU is the child of Fabrice Bellard, the Jacob Collier of programming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

I suspect that Fabrice was already productive as a programmer before Jacob was even born…

I hadn't heard of Jacob Collier, so I guess he is the Fabrice Bellard of his domain.

I keep checking the release notes waiting for the -accel hvf patches for Apple ARM/M1 hosts to make it into a release... looks like I'll still be waiting! I can't figure out how to keep track in the patch system of which patches will apply cleanly to release tags or head of the repo.

Is there anything exciting or noteworthy in this release? My only complaint about QEMU is the networking stack feels complicated, especially for user mode networking. Maybe just need to spend more time with it.

I am going to take a wild guess and say -- it is 6.1 so.. things added to six that didnt make it into the deadline. Quick read of the changelog page shows RISC-V and ARM being filled out, other architectures active too.. and since they had some time, lining up the security gates to add spec-driven sorts of things, which always lag it seems.

All that said, I have not gotten over some early experiences with QEMU myself, which ended up being not very productive. Cowardly I retreated to vbox for daily use on a small network.. maybe 6 series has a different feel for the individual setup now.

I use qemu exclusively for my virtualization needs these days. I migrated away from virtualbox late in the 3.x era. Probably my biggest complaint is that the man page does not actually document all of the arguments to the emulator. For that you have to search the source code.

Can you share some details? I have been trying to break into this. Much appreciated!

Any chance you could be more specific?

It looks like most of the internet has decided that qemu is too scary to use directly and therefore folks tend to use libvirt and various helper utilities. I keep trying them and find them unpleasant and insufficiently useful. So I use systemd units for autostart (as described in the Arch Linux wiki page) and call qemu from there. I often use bridged networking and often pass through PCIe devices (typically GPUs, NVMe disks, and NICs).

I replaced vbox with KVM/qemu over the past year. It's pretty easy to use with libvirt and cockpit.

> My only complaint about QEMU is the networking stack feels complicated

Isn't that down to the features provided by the host OS ?

It is easy to connect it up to whatever you want on a BSD.

What are some interesting things that can be done with QEMU? Can it run a cross-compiled freeRTOS application for a STM32 MCU?

Some stm32 boards are supported, yes. But not many. My fork on GitHub adds a few more.

Is there any documentation on the architecture/design of QEMU to be found somewhere?

Not architecture but internals — https://github.com/airbus-seclab/qemu_blog.

Fantastic share. Thanks.

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