Is there anything exciting or noteworthy in this release? My only complaint about QEMU is the networking stack feels complicated, especially for user mode networking. Maybe just need to spend more time with it.
I am going to take a wild guess and say -- it is 6.1 so.. things added to six that didnt make it into the deadline. Quick read of the changelog page shows RISC-V and ARM being filled out, other architectures active too.. and since they had some time, lining up the security gates to add spec-driven sorts of things, which always lag it seems.
All that said, I have not gotten over some early experiences with QEMU myself, which ended up being not very productive. Cowardly I retreated to vbox for daily use on a small network.. maybe 6 series has a different feel for the individual setup now.
I use qemu exclusively for my virtualization needs these days. I migrated away from virtualbox late in the 3.x era. Probably my biggest complaint is that the man page does not actually document all of the arguments to the emulator. For that you have to search the source code.
It looks like most of the internet has decided that qemu is too scary to use directly and therefore folks tend to use libvirt and various helper utilities. I keep trying them and find them unpleasant and insufficiently useful. So I use systemd units for autostart (as described in the Arch Linux wiki page) and call qemu from there. I often use bridged networking and often pass through PCIe devices (typically GPUs, NVMe disks, and NICs).
