The Linaro Toolchain Working Group is pleased to announce the release of Linaro QEMU 2011.08.

Linaro QEMU 2011.08 is the latest monthly release of qemu-linaro. Based off upstream (trunk) QEMU, it includes a number of ARM-focused bug fixes and enhancements.

This month's release is primarily minor improvements: - Fixes LP:816791: ARMv6 cp15 barrier instructions now work in linux-user mode as well as system mode - Support for ARM1176JZF-S core has been added (thanks to Jamie Iles jamie@jamieiles.com) - Add workaround for kernel bug LP:727781 (which has resurfaced in 3.0) to suppress warnings about bad-width omap i2c accesses Plus of course new upstream fixes and improvements.

Performance: When running qemu in system mode with an SD card image we have determined that performance is best when the image is in writeback caching mode. This significantly increases the performance of the SD card (by factors of 10 or more). An example command line option is: -drive if=sd,cache=writeback,file=my-sd-card.img Note that cache=writeback may result in data not being written to disk if the host system powers down unexpectedly (guest crashes or powerdowns are not a problem).

Known issues: - The beagle and beaglexm models still do not support USB networking - There may be some problems with running multithreaded programs in linux-user mode (LP:823902)

The source tarball is available at: https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro/+milestone/2011.08

Binary builds of this qemu-linaro release are being prepared and will be available shortly for users of Ubuntu. Packages will be in the linaro-maintainers tools ppa:

https://launchpad.net/~linaro-maintainers/+archive/tools/

More information on Linaro QEMU is available at: https://launchpad.net/qemu-linaro