[GRLUG] HUGE new QEMU release

[Tim Schmidt]

http://www.nongnu.org/qemu/changelog.html

TONS of new features in the virtualization software behind KVM,
Virtualbox, Xen's hardware-assisted virtualization and device
emulation, and Win4Lin's commercial products.  For those of you not
familiar with QEMU, now's the time to become so.

For starters, it should now be possible to produce a useful build
without a local account on Fabrice Bellard's (the lead QEMU developer)
development machine.  That is to say, QEMU has depended very closely
on very specific behavior of older versions of GCC.  QEMU now contains
it's own optimizing C compiler - TCG - which alleviates this
dependency.

There are lots of other nice technical features like HPET emulation,
PCI hotplugging, as well as support for more virtual NIC and sound
card adapters.

Perhaps most interesting is the addition of the Nokia 800 and 810
tablets as emulation targets.  QEMU already supports emulation of many
architectures and peripherals, but it appears that as other
virtualization providers are having trouble imagining uses for their
wares other than server consolidation, QEMU has moved past emulating
architectures in a relatively general way, and on to emulating entire
devices as well.  In addition to the Nokia tablets and PCs, QEMU also
emulates the following:

PowerMacs, SPARCstation 5, SPARCstation 10, SPARCstation 20,
SPARCserver 600MP (sun4m architecture), SPARCstation 2 (sun4c
architecture), SPARCserver 1000, or SPARCcenter 2000 (sun4d
architecture), several 32bit and 64bit MIPS machines, Several ARM
devices including "Spitz", "Akita", "Borzoi" and "Terrier" model Sharp
Zaurus PDAs, The Palm Tungsten|E PDA, The Luminary Micro Stellaris
LM3S811EVB and LM3S6965EVB, and several Motorola Coldfire boards.

Those are just what I could pull out of the docs - there are almost
certainly more supported targets.  I've heard something about a
patched QEMU capable of emulating the OpenMoko phone for instance.
Lots more to come from this project in the future, and now is not a
bad time to take a look.

Have fun!

--tim