If qemu_find_file() doesn't find the BIOS it returns NULL; we were passing that unchecked through to load_elf(), which assumes a non-NULL pointer and may misbehave. In practice it fails with a weird message:
$ qemu-system-ppc -M ppce500 -display none -kernel nonesuch Bad address qemu-system-ppc: could not load firmware '(null)' Handle the failure case better: $ qemu-system-ppc -M ppce500 -display none -kernel nonesuch qemu-system-ppc: could not find firmware/kernel file 'nonesuch' Spotted by Coverity (CID 1238954). Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.mayd...@linaro.org> --- hw/ppc/e500.c | 4 ++++ 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+) diff --git a/hw/ppc/e500.c b/hw/ppc/e500.c index 854cd3ac465..0d1f41197cf 100644 --- a/hw/ppc/e500.c +++ b/hw/ppc/e500.c @@ -1047,6 +1047,10 @@ void ppce500_init(MachineState *machine) } filename = qemu_find_file(QEMU_FILE_TYPE_BIOS, payload_name); + if (!filename) { + error_report("could not find firmware/kernel file '%s'", payload_name); + exit(1); + } payload_size = load_elf(filename, NULL, NULL, NULL, &bios_entry, &loadaddr, NULL, NULL, -- 2.20.1