Re: [Qemu-devel] Allow ARMv7M to be started without a kernel

[Rob Landley]

On 05/05/2011 06:26 PM, Alexander Graf wrote:
>> As an aside: I think QEMU should have an option which is "just load
>> a plain ELF or raw binary, with no funny Linux-kernel-specific 
>> behaviour" rather than overloading -kernel to mean "if it's a raw
>> image it's Linux and if it's an ELF file it's not".
> 
> Traditionally, -bios has been that one. -kernel is more of a real
> bootloader replacement, including all the weirdness a bootloader does
> :).

Except that neither "qemu-system-x86_64 -bios vmlinux" nor
qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel vmlinux" will load an ELF kernel on x86-64.

The code to do this _exists_ within qemu, it's just not hooked up
consistently on all targets.  We have a universal cross-platform image
format, and we have support in qemu for loading that format, and for
some reason it's only enabled on certain targets.  I've never understood
why...

Rob