QEMU v1.0-rc2 is released. QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performances.When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. A host driver called the QEMU accelerator (also known as KQEMU) is needed in this case. The virtualizer mode requires that both the host and guest machine use x86 compatible processors.

QEMU v1.0-rc2 Changelog:
General
- i386-softmmu is no longer named qemu but instead referred to as qemu-system-i386 for better consistency with other targets. A new tool is likely to be introduced that uses the qemu name so distributions are advised to not undo this change.
- A new monitor command "info mtree" can show the hierarchy of memory regions in the guest.
- QEMU now has a build dependency on glib.

Block devices (disks)
- QEMU now supports I/O latency accounting in the monitor command "info blockstats".
- Errors are now tracked per device and are shown by the monitor command "info block".
- All image formats now support asynchronous operation. IDE and SCSI emulation will use this feature, while other devices (notably floppy and SD) will not.

IDE/ATAPI
A large number of bugs were fixed regarding CD media change and tray locking.

SCSI
- Memory management errors could crash QEMU when scsi-disk encountered I/O errors. Many instances of this problem were fixed.
- The accuracy of error handling for SCSI emulation has been greatly improved.
- SCSI devices can now be addressed by channel, target (id) and LUN. Not all emulated HBAs will support this feature (in particular, the LSI controller will not).
- Block device pass through is now supported through a new scsi-block device. The scsi-block device works with block devices (like /dev/sda or /dev/sr0) rather than /dev/sgN devices, and is more efficient because it does not consume arbitrary amounts of memory when the guest does large data transfers.
- SCSI CD-ROMs now report media changed events.
- SCSI CD-ROMs now support DVD images.
- Bugfixes for IDE media change also apply to SCSI.
- SCSI devices now report a unit attention condition when the system is started or reset. This may cause problems with old firmware versions.

VDI
Now supports discarded blocks in dynamically-sized images.

Download: QEMU v1.0-rc2
Source: Here