Re: [Qemu-devel] Anyone seeing huge slowdown launching qemu with Linux 2.6.35?

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 08/04/2010 04:00 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> > Maybe we're just being too fancy here.
> >
> > We could rewrite -kernel/-append/-initrd to just generate a floppy
> > image in RAM, and just boot from floppy.
> May be. Can floppy be 100M?

Well, in theory you can have 16384 bytes/sector, 256 tracks, 255 
sectors, 2 heads... that makes 2^(14+8+8+1) = 2 GB. :)  Not sure the 
BIOS would read such a beast, or SYSLINUX.

By the way, if libguestfs insists for an initrd rather than a CDROM 
image, it could do something in between and make an ISO image with 
ISOLINUX and the required kernel/initrd pair.

(By the way, a network installation image for a typical distribution has 
a 120M initrd, so it's not just libguestfs.  It is very useful to pass 
the network installation images directly to qemu via -kernel/-initrd).

Paolo