QEMU Qicks out release Qandidate, new Qadence for version 3.0.0

Some qode qleanup, some tweaks and also an arbitrary numbering thing

The QEMU machine emulator and virtualizer has decided the time is right to give the world version 3.0 and seems also to have acted on a vow to qlean up its qode.

QEMU maintainer Michael Roth last week took to the Qemu-devel list with news that release candidate zero of QEMU version 3.0.0 had arrived.

“Why 3.0?” Roth asked. “Well, we felt that our version numbers were getting a bit unwieldy, and since this year is QEMU's 15th birthday it seemed like a good excuse to roll over the major digit.”

With that decision out of the way, the project’s developers planned to “increment the major version once a year, for the first release of the year. Don't read too much into it: it doesn't imply a drastic compatibility break.”

Nor a drastic new set of features. Full ARM 7 user emulation arrives in this version, as does Sparc32 and Sparc64 emulation. The tool has also gained the ability to emulate itself on x86. There’s also a step up to Simple DirectMedia Layer 2.0, giving it the latest and greatest tools to access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware. GTK 3.0 has also been adopted, for more modern GUI-making fun. But the implementation notes are shorter than the deprecations.

That list of deprecations is notable as in August 2017 QEMU's devs noted that they had no formal process to deprecate old code. Version 3.0.0 includes quite a bit of tidying up.

The project plans new release candidates on Tuesdays, hopefully culminating with rc3 on July 31st and launch of 3.0.0 a week later. Or perhaps another week later on August 14th, if rc4 is needed. ®