Thanks to everyone's feedback on my previous proposal (in particular Jan Kiszka for pointing out hw/pflash_cfi*), I now have a second, much simpler proposal.
http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/PC_System_Flash One area where this deviates from some of the previous feedback is in the command line parameter usage. (Which is essentially all that is left in the proposal.) For simplicity, I chose to retain the existing command line parameters, except to add as use of -pflash for PC systems. Unfortunately, this plan also will not address Carl-Daniel's suggestion to try to emulate SPI. SPI would better match current PC system flash implementations, but it does raise a few tricky questions. On the positive side, this plan is much easier to implement, and I nearly have the patch ready to support it. Thanks, -Jordan
