On Mon, 8 Jun 2026 at 14:23, Gerd Hoffmann <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > When not booting via UEFI you can ignore that. > > > > But if I'm doing direct kernel boot then by definition I'm > > not booting via UEFI, I'm directly booting the kernel... > > You can (on aarch64) do direct kernel boot both with and without > UEFI firmware ... > > Without firmware qemu will load the kernel binary, then start the VM > with the instruction pointer register pointing to the elf entry point. > > With firmware qemu exposes kernel + initrd (and with this patch shim > too) via fw_cfg, and the firmware can pick it up from there and run > it (instead of trying to boot via disk / cdrom / network).
I don't really think of the latter as being direct-boot, and nor does our documentation: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/invocation.html#hxtool-8 # There are broadly 4 ways you can boot a system with QEMU. # # - specify a firmware and let it control finding a kernel # - specify a firmware and pass a hint to the kernel to boot # - direct kernel image boot # - manually load files into the guest's address space # # The third method is useful for quickly testing kernels but as there is # no firmware to pass configuration information to the kernel [...] Anyway, I'll reply to your patch updating the documentation with some suggestions for expanding it. -- PMM
