Re: qemu broke booting of old RedHat floppies

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

Cc'ing avocado-devel for test idea.

On 1/20/21 4:11 PM, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> As someone noticed on IRC, old (2.x) RedHat floppies does not boot
> in current qemu.  When qemu is booted from floppy image at
>  https://archive.org/details/RedHatLinuxBootDisk521998
> (download the "ISO image" link there, it really is an 1.44 floppy),
> seabios says Boot failed and that's it.
> 
> I run git bisect with it, knowing that qemu 2.1 works fine, and
> it pointed out to this commit which is oldish qemu-2.5+:
> 
> commit 4812fa27fa75bce89738a82a191755853dd88408
> Author: John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>
> Date:   Fri Jan 22 15:51:05 2016 -0500
> 
>     fdc: change auto fallback drive for ISA FDC to 288
> 
>     The 2.88 drive is more suitable as a default because
>     it can still read 1.44 images correctly, but the reverse
>     is not true.
> 
>     Since there exist virtio-win drivers that are shipped on
>     2.88 floppy images, this patch will allow VMs booted without
>     a floppy disk inserted to later insert a 2.88MB floppy and
>     have that work.
> 
>     This patch has been tested with msdos, freedos, fedora,
>     windows 8 and windows 10 without issue: if problems do
>     arise for certain guests being unable to cope with 2.88MB
>     drives as the default, they are in the minority and can use
>     type=144 as needed (or insert a proper boot medium and omit
>     type=144/288 or use type=auto) to obtain different drive types.
> 
>     As icing, the default will remain auto/144 for any pre-2.6
>     machine types, hopefully minimizing the impact of this change
>     in legacy hw to basically zero.
> 
>     Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
>     Signed-off-by: John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>
>     Message-id: 1453495865-9649-13-git-send-email-jsnow@redhat.com
> 
> Now, I don't even know where to put that "type=144/288/auto" thing,
> I tried this:
> 
>  -drive
> file=RedHatLinuxBootDisk521998.disk1of1.img,if=floppy,format=raw,type=144
> 
> but it says that format=raw does not support "type=144" option.
> 
> And it's even more: I don't remember which size should be an 1.44Mb
> floppy :))
> The file size of that image is 1492992 bytes which does not look like it
> is of
> standard size, but I can't find which size it should be.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> /mjt
>