This release has been tracked in v49.0 group of our roadmap project.

MSHV Support Improvements

On AArch64 with MSHV, firmware boot (#7391) and graceful guest shutdown
(#7354) are now supported, and CI coverage has been added (#7381).

Logging Improvements

Logs now use an improved timestamp format (#7355), emit an explicit
message on graceful shutdown (#7346), and reduce noisy warnings with
newer guest kernels (#7423).

Removed Default IP and Mask for virtio-net Devices

The implicit default IP (192.168.249.1) and netmask (255.255.255.0) for
virtio-net devices have been removed, as previously announced in the
deprecation notice two releases ago (#7365). Users now can create
virtio-net devices with no IP and netmask assigned.

Notable Bug Fixes

• Prevent crash on malformed vsock connect requests (virtio-devices: refactor VSOCK "connect" parsing #7310)
• Fix vCPU hotplug when the vCPU count exceeds 255 (vmm: fix hotplugging when max_cpus > 255 #7349)
• Drop the VFIO container when no VFIO devices are active (vmm: Drop 'vfio container' when no active vfio devices #7364)
• Gracefully close preserved file descriptors on hot device removal (devices: gracefully close preserved FDs on hot device remove #7371)
• Fix race condition in pause–resume cycles (vcpu lifecycle: fix race-condition in resume()-pause() cycle #7397)
• Add NetConfig offload parameters to the OpenAPI spec file (openapi: add missing NetConfig offload parameters #7445)
• Fix seccomp filter violation from the http-server thread (vmm: allow http-server to use sendto #7454)

Contributors

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to our release:

• Aastha Rawat aastharawat@microsoft.com
• Alyssa Ross hi@alyssa.is
• Anirudh Rayabharam anrayabh@microsoft.com
• Ariel Chenet apchenet@gmail.com
• Bo Chen bchen@crusoe.ai
• Can Zhang icloud9957@gmail.com
• Eugene Korenevsky ekorenevsky@aliyun.com
• Maximilian Güntner code@mguentner.de
• Muminul Islam muislam@microsoft.com
• Oliver Anderson oliver.anderson@cyberus-technology.de
• Philipp Schuster philipp.schuster@cyberus-technology.de
• Rob Bradford rbradford@rivosinc.com
• Ruoqing He heruoqing@iscas.ac.cn
• Wei Liu liuwe@microsoft.com
• Yi Wang foxywang@tencent.com