QEMU 7.0 released with support for RISC-V KVM, Intel AMX, and more

QEMU (Quick EMUlator) is an open-source emulator used to run OS or programs on various architectures such as Arm, RISC-V, and many others when you don’t own specific hardware, or for quick testing.

The developers have released QEMU 7.0 a few days ago with over 2500 commits from 225 developers. New features include support for RISC-V KVM and vector extensions, Intel AMX (Advanced Matrix Extension), improved flexibility for fleecing backups, various new features for Arm, and many more.

QEMU 7.0 highlights listed by the developers:

• ACPI: support for logging guest events via ACPI ERST interface
• virtiofs: improved security label support
• block: improved flexibility for fleecing backups, including support for non-qcow2 images
• ARM: ‘virt’ board support for virtio-mem-pci, specifying guest CPU topology, and enabling PAuth when using KVM/hvf
• ARM: ‘xlnx-versal-virt’ board support for PMC SLCR and emulating the OSPI flash memory controller
• ARM: ‘xlnx-zynqmp’ now models the CRF and APU control
• HPPA: support for up to 16 vCPUs, improved graphics driver for HP-UX VDE/CDE environments, setting SCSI boot order, and a number of other new features
• OpenRISC: ‘sim’ board support for up to 4 cores, loading an external initrd image, and automatically generating a device tree for the boot kernel
• PowerPC: ‘pseries’ emulation support for running guests as a nested KVM hypervisor, and new support for spapr-nvdimm device
• PowerPC: ‘powernv’ emulation improvements for XIVE and PHB 3/4, and new support for XIVE2 and PHB5
• RISC-V: support for KVM
• RISC-V: support for ratified 1.0 Vector extension, as well as Zve64f, Zve32f, Zfhmin, Zfh, zfinx, zdinx, and zhinx{min} extensions.
• RISC-V: ‘spike’ machine support for OpenSBI binary loading
• RISC-V: ‘virt’ machine support for 32 cores, and AIA support.
• s390x: support for “Miscellaneous-Instruction-Extensions Facility 3” (a z15 extension)
• x86: Support for Intel AMX

The full changelog can be found in the wiki. QEMU 7.0 should eventually become available as a package for your favorite distributions, but in the meantime, you would have head over to the Download page to get the source code as a tarball or through Github, and build QEMU 7.0 from source:

Once the build is complete, you can enter the build directory, and get qemu- or qemu-system- binaries for all supported architectures:

Via 9to5linux

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