[Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Major overhaul of block-vvfat

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

Thanks to malc, I started working on this again. It should now work 
reliably in read-only mode. The read/write support is somewhat beta. That 
is, it works for my setup, but it might well break under obscure 
conditions.

What has changed? A lot. For example, it is now possible to emulate a 
floppy:

        -fda fat:floppy:my_directory/

Note that while a floppy is eject'able, the maximum size the guest OSes
accepted in my tests was 2.88MB. Not very much.

To add write/support, do

        -fda fat:floppy:rw:my_directory/

To have a sane write support, I had to include the bdrv_make_empty() patch
I sent to the list a few weeks ago, since it was not applied...

What you *never* should do:

        - use non-ASCII filenames.
        - use "-snapshot" together with ":rw:".
        - expect it to work when loadvm'ing.

What's next?

        - add bootsector support
        - fix bugs which were sent to me by helpful people
        - add a timeout so that a commit is only tried after some time
          has passed since the last sector was written
        - maybe support FAT32 (I am not yet convinced that this is needed)
        - maybe create block-visofs, so that huge files can be mapped into
          the guest system, and be updated via "eject" in the monitor
        - world domination!

Ciao,
Dscho

qemu-vvfat8.patch.gz
Description: application/gunzip