On 05/05/2011 06:26 PM, Alexander Graf wrote: >> As an aside: I think QEMU should have an option which is "just load >> a plain ELF or raw binary, with no funny Linux-kernel-specific >> behaviour" rather than overloading -kernel to mean "if it's a raw >> image it's Linux and if it's an ELF file it's not". > > Traditionally, -bios has been that one. -kernel is more of a real > bootloader replacement, including all the weirdness a bootloader does > :).
Except that neither "qemu-system-x86_64 -bios vmlinux" nor qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel vmlinux" will load an ELF kernel on x86-64. The code to do this _exists_ within qemu, it's just not hooked up consistently on all targets. We have a universal cross-platform image format, and we have support in qemu for loading that format, and for some reason it's only enabled on certain targets. I've never understood why... Rob