OS/2 Warp can not be installed on QEMU 7.1.0 nor 6.2.0 but 5.2.0 works

[Dennis Clarke]

Dear QEMU folks :

    Myself and a few other people have been trying to install OS/2
Warp 4 into a QEMU instance with many various options. In all cases
the process locks up for no reason that is obvious. However this is
only seen when the installer asks for the second floppy disk. Finally
someone tried to use QEMU 5.2.0 and everything just works. This is a
total mystery.

    This has been tested and is repeatable on both Linux x86_64 and
also on a very stable FreeBSD 13.1 machine. I now have three versions
of QEMU on my system here :

hydra$ uname -apKU
FreeBSD hydra 13.1-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p3 GENERIC amd64 
amd64 1301000 1301000

hydra$ /opt/bw/bin/qemu-system-i386 --version
QEMU emulator version 5.2.0
Copyright (c) 2003-2020 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers
hydra$

hydra$ $HOME/local/bin/qemu-system-i386 --version
QEMU emulator version 6.2.0
Copyright (c) 2003-2021 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers
hydra$

hydra$ /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-i386 --version
QEMU emulator version 7.1.0
Copyright (c) 2003-2022 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers
hydra$

The 7.1.0 was installed from a FreeBSD package. There is not much to say
about that. The 6.2.0 was built from sources by me. It fails in the same
manner as 7.1.0.  Myself and a few other people on separate systems and
on Linux as well as FreeBSD have success with 5.2.0. I built the 5.2.0
from sources. The command line was kept as trivial as possible :

$ /opt/bw/bin/qemu-system-i386 -m 64M -hda os2_warp4_disk0.img \
-cdrom resources/cdrom/IBM_OS2_Warp_4.iso \
-fda ./resources/cdrom/Installation.img -boot a

Clearly something somewhere has changed and I will try a git clone the
source tree and see what trunk does also.


--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional