The emulator and virtualizer QEMU was released as version 11.1 on 11 August 2026 – the first maintenance update to the 11.x series. Above all it expands architecture support: RISC-V gains big-endian targets, ARM learns nested virtualization, and PowerPC gets new defaults.
RISC-V and ARM in focus
The highlight for RISC-V is support for big-endian targets. On top of that come the draft Zbr extension, Zvfbfa, KVM compatibility for Zicbop and BFloat16, and support for the K230 board. On the ARM side, users of Apple’s Hypervisor Framework (HVF) can now use nested virtualization on the virt board. In addition, the aarch64=off CPU property lets you boot a 32-bit guest on a 64-bit TCG CPU.
PowerPC defaults and security
- PowerPC: Power11 becomes the default CPU for pseries machines and PowerNV11 the default PowerNV machine. The deprecated Power8E and Power8NVL CPUs were removed.
- Security fixes: USB emulation received several patches against use-after-free issues in
usb-redirand heap access flaws in XHCI sysbus devices; virtio-gpu also got a use-after-free fix.
For homelab and server users running QEMU/KVM directly or through tools like libvirt, the update is worthwhile above all for the security fixes. Operators of PowerPC guests should keep an eye on the new defaults when upgrading.
