Re: [Qemu-devel] installing a boot loader into the disk images

[Magnus Damm <damm@opensource.se>]

Hello,

> You'll have to figure out a way of getting files onto this disk image at some 
> stage :-)  Some possibilities:
> * Use a distro running in QEmu to copy the files across (which it could in 
> turn get from NFS, SAMBA, etc.)
> * Patch your host kernel so that it understands partitions in loop devices
> * Use losetup to individually map the partitions to loop devices, using the -o 
> (offset) switch, then mount those.  (I saw a script for doing this on a 
> mailing list somewhere - Google knows)

I've created a tool that makes it possible to create and populate
filesystems (ext2/ext3/reiserfs right now) on a disk image. Scriptable
without root permissions. 

This tool is actually a small custom linux distribution (< 3 Mbytes)
desigend to be executed in the QEMU environment. It is possible to pass
a set of commands or a script to the QEMU environment for easy
scripting. Files are transfered from the host to the guest with TFTP.
Busybox fdisk is included (if I remember correctly that is), but no
lilo/grub yet. You need a recent CVS snapshot of QEMU or 0.6.0 with a
patch to get the tftp support.

I really would like to get this project out of my closet, one big
problem right now is that the entire source code is so damn large (> 100
Mbytes) and I need a way to distribute that amount of data. I was
thinking bittorrent, does anyone know a good tracker for FOSS?

Thanks!

/ magnus