[ANNOUNCE] QEMU 4.2.0 is now available

[Michael Roth]

Hello,

On behalf of the QEMU Team, I'd like to announce the availability of
the QEMU 4.2.0 release. This release contains 2200+ commits from 198
authors.

You can grab the tarball from our download page here:

  https://www.qemu.org/download/#source

The full list of changes are available at:

  https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/4.2

Highlights include:

 * TCG plugin support for passive monitoring of instructions and memory accesses
 * block: NBD block driver now supports more efficient handling of copy-on-read
   requests
 * block: NBD server optimizations for copying of sparse images, and general
   fixes/improvements for NBD server/client implementations
 * block/crypto: improved performance for AES-XTS encryption for LUKS disk
   encryption
 * vfio-pci support for "failover_pair_id" property for easier migration of
   VFIO devices
 * virtio-mmio now supports virtio-compatible v2 personality and virtio 1.1
   support for packed virtqueues

 * 68k: new "next-cube" machine for emulating a classic NeXTcube
 * 68k: new "q800" machine for emulating Macintosh Quadro 800
 * ARM: new "ast2600-evb" machine for  emulating Aspeed AST2600 SoC
 * ARM: semihosting v2.0 support with STDOUT_STDERR/EXIT_EXTENDED extentions
 * ARM: KVM support for more than 256 CPUs
 * ARM: "virt" machine now supports memory hotplugging
 * ARM: improved TCG emulation performance
 * ARM: KVM support for SVE SIMD instructions on SVE-capable hardware
 * PowerPC: emulation support for mffsce, mffscrn, and mffscrni POWER9
   instructions
 * PowerPC: "powernv" machine now supports Homer and OCC SRAM system devices
 * RISC-V: "-initrd" argument now supported
 * RISC-V: debugger can now see all architectural state
 * s390: emulation support for IEP (Instruction Execution Protection)
 * SPARC: "sun4u" IOMMU now supports "invert endianness" bit
 * x86: VMX features can be enabled/disabled via "-cpu" flags
 * x86: new "microvm" machine that uses virtio-mmio instead of PCI for use as
   baseline for performance optimizations
 * x86: emulation support for AVX512 BFloat16 extensions
 * x86: new CPU models for Denverton (server-class Atom-based SoC), Snowridge,
   and Dhyana
 * x86: macOS Hypervisor.framework support ("-accel hvf") now considered stable
 * xtensa: new "virt" machine type
 * xtensa: call0 ABI support for user-mode emulation

 * and lots more...

Thank you to everyone involved!