Bootloading within QEMU?

[Kenneth Adam Miller]

Hello,

I am trying to discover how to schedule QEMU to begin actual emulation as currently my target correctly starts QEMU but only shows the shell, and not even boot loading occurs within QEMU. I'm trying to learn from example, and so will focus my questions only on X86. I can see the MachineClass and MachineState types, and I have tried to follow QEMU with the debugger and found where QEMU calls qemu_init and qemu_main_loop under qemu/softmmu/main.c, and even tried to follow through from init to main loop to see where it would begin booting, but I cannot see where the bootloader is scheduled or specified or started from within the target occurs.

It's difficult because the surrounding QEMU APIs that each target must use isn't documented at all. There's a little bit of abstract documentation that can be generated, same as what is publicly found. Reading that only does so much good because there isn't much of a guide as to how to program the surrounding QEMU libraries.