By Bobby Borisov
Publication Date: 2026-08-11 16:11:00
QEMU 11.1 has been released as the first maintenance update to the 11.x series for this open-source machine emulator and virtualizer, with the headline change being the addition of RISC-V big-endian target support.
The release also expands the architecture’s ISA coverage with support for the draft Zbr extension, Zvfbfa, KVM support for Zicbop and BFloat16 extensions, fractional LMUL handling for vector SHA instructions, and several disassembler improvements.
RISC-V machine support has grown, as QEMU 11.1 adds support for the K230 board, updates OpenSBI to version 1.8.1, introduces Tenstorrent mvendorid support, and includes a large number of fixes across the IOMMU, interrupt handling, page-table walking, vector instructions, and other low-level areas.
On the Arm side, Apple HVF users can now use nested virtualization on the virt board, and qemu-system-aarch64 can boot a 32-bit guest on a 64-bit TCG CPU by using the aarch64=off CPU property.
QEMU 11.1 also introduces experimental emulation of the GICv5 interrupt controller and adds support for loading a UEFI shim through the standard -shim argument. On NVIDIA Tegra241 systems, Command Queue Virtualization support can provide individual virtual machines with dedicated hardware SMMUv3 command queues.
The Arm CPU emulation side has also been expanded with a long list of newly supported architectural features, including several FP8, SME, SSVE, Memory Tagging Extension, and RME capabilities.
PowerPC…
