Version 1.0 of QEMU published

Following four release candidates, the QEMU project has announced the arrival of version 1.0 of its open source system emulator. QEMU can be used as a stand-alone desktop virtualisation product or be used to emulate guest hardware, such as an ARM-based board on a standard x86 PC.

The major update to the software now uses a separate thread for each VCPU and adds support for new CPUs; the SCSI emulation has also been improved. One experimental feature is particularly interesting: instead of generating native code run by the host operating system, QEMU can now create bytecode and run it with its own interpreter (Tiny Code Interpreter). Because of this, only the interpreter needs to be adapted for other host systems; the code generator does not.

The KVM and Xen virtualisation platforms both use QEMU as a basis for their virtual machines and benefit from features such as improved live migration with QCOW2 in shared memory. However, QEMU is no longer suited for use as an independent virtualisation solution, as development of the necessary accelerator modules has been suspended.

Further information about the release can be found in the change log. QEMU 1.0 is available to download from the project's site and documentation is provided. Source code for QEMU is licensed under the GPLv2.

See also:

• QEMU 0.15 offers full Xen support, a report from The H.

(crve)