from the emulators-help-solve-microchip-shortages dept.
QEMU 7.0 Released With Intel AMX Support, Many RISC-V Additions
Since QEMU 6.2 at the end of last year, developers at Red Hat and other organizations have been busy working on QEMU 7.0 as this open-source emulator widely used as part of the free software Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.0 brings support for Intel AMX, a lot of ongoing RISC-V work, and more. Some of the QEMU 7.0 highlights include:
- QEMU continues maturing for the RISC-V CPU architecture support. QEMU 7.0 supports RISC-V's 1.0 Vector extension in ratified form, the RISC-V KVM support that was recently mainlined, experimental support for 128-bit CPUs, and support for a variety of other recent RISC-V extensions. The RISC-V virt machine now also supports up to 32 cores.
- QEMU 7.0 on x86 adds support for Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Intel AMX is one of the big additions coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors shipping later this year and open-source Intel engineers have been busy plumbing AMX support throughout the Linux stack.
- Initial bits of SR/IOV support has landed for QEMU's PCI/PCIe code.
What if a program ran on an emulator but not on the real hardware? What if real hardware could not keep pace with the development of emulators for that hardware?
See Also:
www.qemu.org
Change Log 7.0
(Score: 3, Funny) by shrewdsheep on Thursday April 21 2022, @08:14PM
If the emulator runs faster than the hardware, you just keep emulating first on the hardware, then within the emulator and so on. As each emulation can be seen as hardware, the speed increases exponentially. Once you exceed the speed of light, time runs backwards. That's the basis of the flux capacitor (apart from knocking your head hard against something).
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21 2022, @08:18PM (4 children)
Can it emulate a machine that doesn't have systemd?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21 2022, @09:22PM (2 children)
It's systemd all the way down.
You know when those "futurologists" contemplate about how maybe our reality is really just running in a computer simulation? Well what do you think that simulation is running on???
You got it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21 2022, @09:34PM
Nope. You did down and it is systemd running in WSL and Windows Service Manager. That is being emulated on an IBM mainframe. And now you know why the Matrix is fake, gay and hella lame.
(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Friday April 22 2022, @12:14AM
All those cryptid sightings are just binary logfile corruption from universed.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 22 2022, @01:40PM
Qemu emulates the bare metal experience of various machines. Thus, you are able to emulate native (ARM architecture) Raspberry Pi performance in a virtual machine (using Qemu) in your x86-64 Windows environment. You can also do the reverse of that, but the performance of a Raspberry Pi isn't up to snuff for the likes of Windows XP, let alone Windows 10. You can still have a good experience using a Raspberry Pi, but you need to know the limits of the system you're dealing with. In other words, you can use a table saw to cut various sizes and shapes of boards. But, sometimes a Dremel is all you need.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday April 22 2022, @04:11PM
A few years ago I did a Google search to see if there was anything FOSS that could emulate the itanic. Nothing! I wondered how itanic binaries would run under emulation on a modern 64-bit x86.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @05:15AM (1 child)
Happens all the time with retro game system emulators. Most notably, there's a lot of SNES romhacks (modifications to existing software) and homebrew (newly made software) that run on emulators but not on a real Super Nintendo. It can sometimes be difficult to convince people that "but it runs on ZSNES" doesn't mean that something is well-made or correct. Though it seems to have gotten better in recent years, with more powerful computers able to run more accurate emulators at closer to full speed, plus low-ish cost flashcarts to enable easy testing on real hardware.
This might be a challenge for RISC-V. Other interesting challenges might include: What if emulators are inaccurate or buggy and software is commonly written to assume the flaws in the emulator? What if a particular RISC-V hardware manufacturer deviates from specifications and implements these deviations in popular emulators, thereby becoming the de-facto implementation?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday April 23 2022, @04:29PM
Then load the emulator source code into vim, fix it and recompile. Then fix the application software.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].