Use @option{memdev} with @var{memory-backend-ram} backend or @option{mem} (if
it's supported by used machine type) to define mapping explictly instead.
+@subsection -mem-path fallback to RAM (since 4.1)
+Currently if guest RAM allocation from file pointed by @option{mem-path}
+fails, QEMU falls back to allocating from RAM, which might result
+in unpredictable behavior since the backing file specified by the user
+is ignored. In the future, users will be responsible for making sure
+the backing storage specified with @option{-mem-path} can actually provide
+the guest RAM configured with @option{-m} and QEMU will fail to start up if
+RAM allocation is unsuccessful.
+
@section QEMU Machine Protocol (QMP) commands
@subsection block-dirty-bitmap-add "autoload" parameter (since 2.12.0)
In the future, QEMU will require Python 3 to be available at
build time. Support for Python 2 in scripts shipped with QEMU
is deprecated.
+
+@section Backwards compatibility
+
+@subsection Runnability guarantee of CPU models (since 4.1.0)
+
+Previous versions of QEMU never changed existing CPU models in
+ways that introduced additional host software or hardware
+requirements to the VM. This allowed management software to
+safely change the machine type of an existing VM without
+introducing new requirements ("runnability guarantee"). This
+prevented CPU models from being updated to include CPU
+vulnerability mitigations, leaving guests vulnerable in the
+default configuration.
+
+The CPU model runnability guarantee won't apply anymore to
+existing CPU models. Management software that needs runnability
+guarantees must resolve the CPU model aliases using te
+``alias-of'' field returned by the ``query-cpu-definitions'' QMP
+command.