[Qemu-devel] Documentation for Windows host - is a QEMU wiki the way forward ?

[Armistead, Jason]

I don't want to start another flame war regarding the QEMU documentation.  I
accept that like many open source projects, QEMU is a work in progress (and
a mighty fine one at that) and that like many of these systems, the
documentation often gets a bit out of step with the current bleeding edge of
the development going on in CVS.

As a Windows host platform user trying to get QEMU to run an non-x86 guest
environment (in this case Sparc/SunOS or Sparc/Solaris) the documentation is
unclear about how to do certain things.

I accept that the majority of QEMU users and developers are running it on
Linux hosts.  Fantastic, but it just won't happen in the corporate
environment I'm working in, so for me, it's got to be a Windows QEMU host or
nothing.

With Windows, how can I use my host OS CD-ROM or floppy disk with the -fda
-fdb and -cdrom options.

Windows doesn't support the notion of /dev/fd0, /dev/fd1 and /dev/cdrom
which are expounded in the documentation (I'm looking at section 3.3
Invocation via http://www.qemu.org/qemu-doc.html#SEC10 )

I want to emulate some ageing Sun Sparc workstations that we have, so I can
finally kill the real (slowly dying) hardware off.

Sun's Sparc has no concept of disk letters - everything hinges on the idea
of SCSI IDs (at least going back to the Sparcstation platforms I'm
interested in which were prior to some Suns having IDE hard drives)

So again, the mapping of -hda -hdb -hdc -hdd which are nice for PC IDE
master and slave drives on primary and secondary IDE interfaces are somewhat
meaningless (or at least, non-obvious) when I really want to map according
to SCSI targets, which could be (for a narrow SCSI bus) from 0 to 7.  Maybe
some room to expand QEMU  to more devices (that would take it to -hdh) ?
But I digress !

I know there is the "Unofficial #qemu Wiki" on
http://kidsquid.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/

How about an official (rather than unofficial) QEMU Wiki where we can ALL
contribute to the documentation process ?  I think there are lots of things
the collective geniuses on this list could contribute - and a wiki is often
a lot nicer way to summarize knowledge than trawling through and endless
number of mail archive postings.  If people want to contribute to the
documentation, they can.   If they want to just lurk and watch selected
pages, they can.  If they want to add screen-shots, they can.  If they want
to ask questions about particular documentation, there is always the
Discussion pages associated with each article.  I've always been a big fan
of MediaWik as used on Wikipedia for all these reasons.

How about it ?



Cheers

Jason