Re: [Qemu-devel] suggestion for the QEMU advent calendar

[Fabian Greffrath]

Am Dienstag, den 09.12.2014, 10:28 +0100 schrieb Kevin Wolf: 
> Syslinux is relatively easy as well. Just avoid GRUB 2 if you want to
> set up disk images from the host. I've done it before, but it's ugly...

Yep, I was talking about GRUB 2. However, in the meantime I have figured
out what to do in order to create a "minimal" booting image. After all
the image creation, partitioning, formatting, device mapping and finally
mounting you only have to call "grub-install" with the right parameters
(!), copy the actual kernel into the image and create a minimal grub.cfg
file.

By "right parameters" I meant that grub-install per default copies GRUB
2 in its entirety onto the image, including the whole menu system,
graphical support, file system drivers and localization, etc. This will
take up about 10MB, which is why I put the "minimal" word in quotation
marks. You can, of course, manually select which modules you want to
install, but this must be a perfect guess. In my simple case it worked
with '--install-modules="part_msdos ext2 multiboot normal" --locales=""'
passed to grub-install on the command line.

Anyway, it's easier to just boot the multiboot kernel image and be done
with it. ;)

Cheers,

Fabian