Re: [PATCH 00/12] single-binary: link ARM and RISC-V into qemu-system

On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 02:40:46PM +0100, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> On 26/08/2026 13:32, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 11:07:18PM +0800, Yonggang Luo wrote:
> > 
> > snip,
> > 
> > ..to comment just on the end result for now..
> > 
> > Specifically
> > 
> >   * -nodefaults should become the default
> >   * All CLI args should be processed in order from
> >     the command line, so we eliminate the nonsense
> >     where we process some -object, then -chardev,
> >     then more -object through hand crafted deps
> > 
> >   * No default machine type
> 
> I would even go as far as to suggest that we should make modules mandatory
> for qemu-system, so that devices can be loaded upon demand during machine
> construction to help keep the size down.

I think it is worth considering whether modules could be mandatory
unconditionally for everything. We don't need to block on this
decision though.

> I'll leave whether that is through dependency tracking or via an explicit
> load directive for someone else to decide :)
> >   * Drop all legacy syntax so we only have a single
> >     QAPI based way of configuring.
> >     eg drop -hda, -hdb, -cdrom, -drive, etc
> >        only keeping -blockdev
> >     eg drop -mon, -monitor, -qmp, etc only
> >        keeping -object
> 
> The only problem with this is that I often get a lot of complaints that QEMU
> command lines are complicated from retro folks who just want to run their
> favourite old games. Why would they want to come up with a long-winded
> -drive command line when they can just use -hda instead?

-blockdev isn't as hard as it appears - we make it harder than it ought
to be by not documenting it well and carrying on using -hda/-drive in
examples so users have little good guidance. Then when people go beyond
the needs that -hda can service, they have an worse experiance as a
result.

Having many different ways to do the same thing and not getting rid of
enough outdated/obsoleted stuff is what has always created confusion
for QEMU.

Also why it is -hda when it is created a SCSI disk (sda), or a VirtIO
disk (xda) or a SSD (mmcblk0), or the guest is calling it C:\ :-)

Yes, -hda is simple, but it is also nonsensical historical cruft.


All the various "convenience" args are also something that could be
provided by a higher level launcher script that translates to the
canonical syntax, even if they're not in qemu-system itself.

With regards,
Daniel
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