Caches are a key way that enables modern CPUs to keep running at full speed by avoiding the need to fetch data and instructions from the comparatively slow system memory. As a result understanding cache behaviour is a key part of performance optimisation.

Sometimes, there is a VM disk image whose contents you want to manipulate without booting the VM. One way of doing this is to use libguestfs, which can boot a minimal Linux VM to provide the host with secure access to the disk’s contents. For example, guestmount allows you to mount a guest filesystem on the host, without requiring root rights.

We’d like to announce the availability of the QEMU 6.1.0 release. This release contains 3000+ commits from 221 authors.