14 DAY TRIAL // QEMU 2.0, a generic open source emulator and virtualizer that can run OSes and programs made for a different machine, has been released and is available for download.
QEMU 2.0 supports visualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux.
"When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance."
"When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. QEMU supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, QEMU can virtualize x86, server and embedded PowerPC, and S390 guests," reads the official website.
As usual, every new version of QEMU comes with a ton of changes and fixes. For example, all onboard buses now have distinct names, so that all of them can be reached with "-device bus=...," i2c-bus.0 has been upgraded to i2c-bus.1 for n800 and n810 machines, qemu-system-arm no longer defaults to the obsolete "integratorcp." if no machine is specified on the command line, and support has been added for "-M virt," a board type that only uses virtio devices.
On the ARM platform, support has been added for "-cpu host" when running under KVM, support has been implemented for the new 32-bit mode ARMv8 instructions in TCG, initial support for KVM on AArch64 systems has been implemented, support has been added for the Canon PowerShot A1100 DIGIC board using "-M canon-a1100", flow control has been added in the Cadence UART, and "integratorcp" is no longer the default machine.
On the x86 architechture, the HPET interrupt can now be attached to GSIs 16-23, the Q35 machine now supports CPU hotplug, two flash chips can now be specified using the "-drive if=pflash" or "-pflash" options twice, support has been added for the migration of Intel MPX registers, the Apple SMC device is now exposed in the ACPI tables, PCI hotplug now supports devices behind a bridge, support has been added for the Hyper-V reference time counter via the "hv-time" suboption of "-cpu", and the ACPI tables generated by QEMU can now be used by OVMF firmware.
A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement. Download QEMU 2.0 right now from Softpedia.