Re: -drive syntax

[Max Reitz]

On 15.10.20 02:23, Kevin Shell wrote:
> Hello qemu users.

Hi,

> I have three questions about the -drive syntax.
> 
> 1) I have see the syntax "-drive id=SOMEID",
>    but the id option is not documented in the man page,
>    what's the meaning of the id option and when to use it?

I think most objects you can create on the command line have an id
option that is later used to identify the object.

This becomes important for your second question:

> 2) what's the meaning of if=none and when to use it?

It’s discouraged to use -drive and define both a block device and a
guest device with it.

Simply speaking, a block device is qemu’s internal representation of a
disk image.  It’s something that e.g. can be attached to guest devices
so they have something to store their data in.

A guest device is e.g. your SATA device in the guest.

Those are two separate entities, so ideally you’ll create them separately.

To create plain block devices (without a guest device), you can either
use -drive if=none, or -blockdev.  -blockdev is more modern, but -drive
is simpler to use (in simple cases).

So in your example, these commands would look like this:

  -drive if=none,id=disk1,file=disk1.qcow2

Or for -blockdev:

  -blockdev '{ "node-name": "disk1",
               "driver": "qcow2",
               "file": {
                   "driver": "file",
                   "filename": "disk1.qcow2"
               } }'

To create a guest device, the ID you were talking about in question 1
comes into play: You use -device and supply that ID through the “drive”
option, like so:

  -device virtio-blk,drive=disk1

> 3) why there is no if=sata,
>    is SATA disks treated as IDE/ATA disks?

Not sure, but you’ll probably just have to use the separated syntax I
was talking about above.  Googling reveals that apparently you need to
create an AHCI (which acts as a bus) and then attach devices as IDE
disks to that bus:

  -drive if=none,id=disk1,file=disk1.qcow2 \
  -device ahci,id=ahci \
  -device ide-hd,bus=ahci.0,drive=disk1

Hope that helps.

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