QEMU 5.0 Supports Recent Armv8.x Features, Cortex-M7 CPU, Host Directory Access, and More

QEMU (Quick EMUlator) is an open-source emulator that’s great to run programs on various architectures such as Arm, RISC-V, and many others when you don’t own proper hardware.

The developers have now released QEMU 5.0.0 will plenty of new features and such as support for Armv8.1 to Armv8.4 architectures, Arm Cortex-M7 processor, various changes to MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390… architectures, support for accessing a directory on the host filesystem from the guest using virtiofsd and more.

There have been over 2800+ commits from 232 developers, so the list of changes to too long to write here, but some of the highlights include:

Support for passing host filesystem directory to guest via virtiofsd
Support for ARMv8.1 VHE/VMID16/PAN/PMU, ARMv8.2 UAO/DCPoP/ATS1E1/TTCNP, ARMv8.3 RCPC/CCIDX, ARMv8.4 PMU/RCPC
Added ARM Cortex-M7 CPU support
New Arm boards: tacoma-bmc, Netduino Plus 2, and Orange Pi PC
Allwinner SoC model now wires up the USB ports
TPM support for ARM

You’ll find the full list of change in the Wiki.

If you want to install the latest version of your operating system be it Windows, Mac OS or Linux go to the download page. In Windows, you’ll have binaries, while in Linux it will depend on your distributions, and it’s likely qemu related packages have not been updated to the latest version just yet. So one way is to build from source:

wget https://download.qemu.org/qemu-5.0.0.tar.xz
tar xvJf qemu-5.0.0.tar.xz
cd qemu-5.0.0
./configure
make -j $(nproc)

wget https://download.qemu.org/qemu-5.0.0.tar.xz

tar xvJf qemu-5.0.0.tar.xz

cd qemu-5.0.0

./configure

make -j $(nproc)

I could not find any ppa or snap for Ubuntu with QEMU 5.0, but only older 2.x or 3.x version.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.