ATAPI Passthrough or how to expose a CD drive to a VM

[Philipp Ammann]

Dear List!

I'm looking for a way to plug a CD drive's SATA cable into the virtual
SATA controller in the guest, i.e. pass through a single SATA port.
Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be possible. The next best thing is
to pass through ATAPI commands from the guest to the physical CD drive.
The reason is that I want to run Exact Audio Copy (EAC) in the guest to
create bit-perfect copies of my audio CDs (which is a surprisingly hard
thing to do!).

EAC (and IIRC CDDA reading in general) sends low-level ATAPI commands to
the CD drive, which is why I want to pass them through. When searching
for this I found this thread from 2009~10:

https://qemu-devel.nongnu.narkive.com/HNXMnx1m/patch-0-7-atapi-cdrom-passthrough-v5

There is also this patch from 2015:

https://github.com/brendank310/meta-qemu-1.4-oxt/blob/master/recipes-openxt/qemu-dm/files/atapi-pass-through.patch

I was wondering if this has ever made it into qemu and if so how to
enable it.

The only remaining option I see is buying a PCIe-SATA controller and
passing the entire controller to the VM.

Do you folks have any ideas here?

Thanks!
Philipp