Re: Failure to boot CDROM with -drive arg

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 11:17:24AM +0200, Soren Hansen wrote:
>   
>> On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 09:37:30AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>>     
>>> The following two command lines should be identical from the user's
>>> point of view:
>>>
>>> # qemu-kvm -cdrom /home/berrange/boot.iso -boot d -m 500
>>>
>>> # qemu-kvm -drive file=/home/berrange/boot.iso,if=ide,media=cdrom,index=2,boot=on -m 500
>>>       
>> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1977971&group_id=180599&atid=893831
>>     
>
> Ok, so basically this is saying that boot=on only works for media=disk.
> I really don't like the fact that we now have 2 different ways of flagging
> bootable disks, depending on whether want to use BIOS boot or extboot.
>   

Semantically, boot=on means "make this the first bootable hard disk".  
That's not to say that there shouldn't be a check.

If you did:

qemu-system-x86 -drive file=foo.img,boot=on -boot d

You would still boot from the cdrom.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> The management apps shouldn't have to make such a decision - QEMU should
> be picking the most appropriate choice for us. ie, if we have boot=on
> with an IDE cdrom, then QEMU should automatically do a BIOS boot instead
> of extboot. This way if extboot gets improved, QEMU can update its logic
> to correspond without needing to change all the management apps using
> QEMU.
>
> Daniel
>